“I know,” he agreed.  “But that isn’t it.  It isn’t a question of what you’d like to be, or are willing to be.  It’s a question of what you are.  You’re something more than just my wife.  You’ve got certain talents—­certain proved capacities.  That’s as true as that I am something besides—­just your husband.  There you are!  Try it on the other way around.  Suppose I should offer to give up my practise and come down here to live with you—­be just your husband and, say, your business manager.  You can see that that’s preposterous.  Or, for that matter, we could both quit.  I’ve made a devil of a lot of money lately.  I’ve an income from my investments of from twenty-five to thirty thousand a year that we could live on, and not do a blessed thing but be husband and wife to each other.  Like the McCreas.  But it wouldn’t work.  You’ve got to be what you are, that’s the point, and somehow or other, cut your life to fit.  I expect that’s one of the things that’s been the trouble with us down here.  We’ve both been trying so damned hard to be something.  And that won’t work.”

“What will work then?” she asked.  And this was a question he couldn’t answer.

“We’ve just got to go ahead,” he said at last, “and see what happens.  Perhaps you can work it out so that you can do part of your work at home.  We could move the nursery and give you Florence’s old studio.  And then it would do if you only came down here for your two big seasons—­fall and spring.”

“That doesn’t seem fair to you,” she protested.  “You deserve a real wife, Roddy; not somebody dashing in and dashing out.”

“I don’t deserve anything I can’t get,” he said.  “I’d rather have a part interest in you than to possess, lock, stock and barrel, any other woman I can think of.”

She came back to him again and settled down in his arms.

“You used to possess me, lock, stock and barrel,” she said.  “You can do it again, if you’ll say the word, Rodney.”

He shook his head.  “That’s just what I can’t do,” he told her.  “That’s gone and we’ll never get it back.  And I don’t believe I’d have it back if I could.  For one thing, you can’t possess without being possessed.  I know that back in those days you’re talking about I used to try to fight you out of my thoughts.  Used to stay down late at the office, not working, just—­trying not to think about you.  Trying to save out part of myself from being—­saturated with you.  It was the fact that I was so terribly important to you that used to make me feel like that; the fact of your—­dependence—­I don’t mean for money—­on me.  I used to think—­it wasn’t your lover that thought that; it was the other man—­that it would be a perfectly wonderful relief to me if you could just get some interest that left me out.  And all the while the lover in me was trying to have all of you there was.  It’s a hard thing to talk sense about.”

“A man told me,” Rose said, “—­John Galbraith told me, that he couldn’t be a woman’s friend and her lover at the same time, any more than a steel spring could be made soft so that it would bend in your fingers like copper, and still be a spring.  He said that was true of him, anyway, and he felt sure it was true of nine men out of a dozen.  Do you think it’s true?  Have we got to decide which we’ll be?”