“We can’t decide,” he said with an impatient laugh.  “That’s just what I’ve been telling you.  We’ve got to take what we can get.  We’ve got to work out the relation between ourselves that is our relation—­the Rose and Rodney relation.  It’ll probably be a little different from any other.  There’ll be friendship in it, and there’ll be love in it.  Imagine our ‘deciding’ that we wouldn’t be lovers!  But I guess that what Galbraith said was true to this extent:  that each of those will be more or less at the expense of the other.  It won’t spring quite so well, and it will bend a little.”

She was still disposed to rebel at this conclusion.  “I don’t see why it has to be that way,” she insisted.  “Why it can’t be a perfect thing instead of just a compromise.  Why being friends and partners shouldn’t make us better lovers, and why being lovers shouldn’t make us better friends.”

“Like the doctrine of the Trinity,” he murmured. “’Three in one; one in three.  Without confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.’  It’s a wonderful idea, certainly.”

“Well, then,” she demanded, “isn’t it what we ought to try for?  The very best there is?”

“That’s what they tell us,” he admitted. “‘Aim high,’ they say.  I’m not sure it isn’t better sense to aim at something you can hit.  Why, look at us, these last three weeks!  We said we were going to have a month of pure happiness.  One hundred per cent. pure.  We waked up every morning telling ourselves we’d got to be happy, and we made ourselves miserable every night wondering if we’d been happy enough.”

“I’m glad you were miserable, too,” she said.  “I was so ashamed of myself for being.”

After a while he said, “Here’s what we’ve got to build on:  Whatever else it may or may not be, this relation between us is a permanent thing.  We’ve lived with each other and without each other, and we know which we want.  If we find it has its limitations and drawbacks we needn’t worry.  Just go ahead and make the best of it we can.  There’s no law that decrees we’ve got to be happy.  When we are happy it’ll be so much to the good.  And when we aren’t ...”

She gave a contented little laugh and cuddled closer down against him.  “You talk like Solomon in all his solemnity,” she said.  “But you can’t imagine that we’re going to be unhappy.  Really.”

His answer was that perhaps he couldn’t imagine it, but that he knew it, just the same.  “Even an ordinary marriage isn’t any too easy; a marriage, I mean, where it’s quite well understood which of the parties to it shall always submit to the other; and which of them is the important one who’s always to have the right of way.  There’s generally something perfectly unescapable that decides that question.  But with us there isn’t.  So the question who’s got to give in will have to be decided on its merits every time a difference arises.”

She burlesqued a look of extreme apprehension.  She was deeply and utterly content with life just then.  But he wouldn’t be diverted.