In the process of figuring it out he’d more or less forgotten Rose.  He had been tramping along communing with his pipe; thinking aloud.  If he’d been watching her face he wouldn’t have gone so far.

“Well, if it’s like that,” she said, and the quality of her voice drew his full attention instantly—­“if love has to be like that, then the game doesn’t seem worth going on with.  You can’t live with it, and you can’t live—­without it.”  Her voice dropped a little, but gained in intensity.  “At least I can’t.  I don’t believe I can.”  She stopped and faced him.  “What can one do?” she demanded.  “Wait, I suppose you’ll say, till you’re fifty.  Well, you’re fifty, and the thing can still torment you; spring on you when you aren’t looking; twist you about.”  She turned away with a despairing gesture and stood gazing out, tear-blinded, over the little valley the hilltop they had reached commanded.

“You want to remember this,” he said at last.  “I’ve been talking about myself.  I haven’t even pretended to guess for more than nine of those twelve men.  That leaves three who are, I am pretty sure, different.  I might have been different myself, a little anyway, if I’d got a different sort of start.  If my first love-affair had been an altogether different thing.  If it had been the kind that gave me a home and kids.  So you don’t want to take what I’ve said for anything more than just the truth about me.  And I’m not, thank God, a fair sample.”

He stood behind her, miserably helpless to say or do anything to comfort her.  An instinct told him she didn’t want his hands on her just then, and he couldn’t unsay the things he had told her any further than he had already.

Presently she turned back to him, slid her hand inside his arm, and started down the road with him.  “My love-affair brought me a home and—­kids,” she said.  “There are two of them—­twins—­a year and a half old now; and I went off and left them; left him.  And all I did it for was to make myself over, into somebody he could be friends with, instead of just—­as I said then—­his mistress.  I’d never known a woman then who was a man’s mistress, really, and I didn’t see why he should be so angry over my using the word.  I thought it was fair enough.  And the day I left his house I came to you and got a job in the chorus in The Girl Up-stairs.  I thought that by earning my own way, building a life that he didn’t—­surround, as you say—­I could win his friendship.  And have his love besides.  I don’t suppose you would have believed there could be such a fool in the world as I was to do that.”

He took a while digesting this truly amazing statement of hers, a half-mile perhaps of steady silent tramping.  But at last he said, “No, I wouldn’t call you a fool.  I call a fool a person who thinks he can get something for nothing.  You didn’t think that.  You were willing to pay—­a heavy price it must have been, too—­for what you wanted.  And I’ve an idea, you know, that you never really pay without getting something; though you don’t always get what you expect.  You’ve got something now.  A knowledge of what you can do; of what you are worth; and I don’t believe you’d trade it for what you had the day before you came to me for a job.”