why when Jim calmly told me that he had borrowed a hundred dollars from you I felt that was a little more than I could stand.  That’s piling it on.  I wondered why you gave it to him—­if you let him have it in a spirit of contemptuous charity.  I might have known it wasn’t that.  But don’t lend him any more.  He really doesn’t need it.  Borrowing with Jim is just like asking for a smoke.  He’s queer.  If he made a bet with you and lost he’d pay up promptly, if he had to pawn his clothes and mine too.  Borrowed money, however, seems to come in a different category.  When this estate comes into his hands perhaps I shall be able to return some of this money that we wasted.  I think that—­and the fact that I’m just a little afraid to break away and face the world alone—­is chiefly what keeps me faithful to him now.”

“Is it as bad as that?” Hollister asked.

“Don’t misunderstand me, Robin,” she protested.  “I’m not an abused wife or anything like that.  He’s perfectly satisfied, as complacent as an English gentleman can be in the enjoyment of possession.  But he doesn’t love me any more than I love him.  He blandly assumes that love is only a polite term for something else.  And I can’t believe that—­yet.  Maybe I’m what Archie Lawanne calls a romantic sentimentalist, but there is something in me that craves from a man more than elementary passion.  I’m a woman; therefore my nature demands of a man that he be first of all a man.  But that alone isn’t enough.  I’m not just a something to be petted when the fit is on and then told in effect to run along and play.  There must be men who have minds as well as bodies.  There must be here and there a man who understands that a woman has all sorts of thoughts and feelings as well as sex.  Meanwhile—­I mark time.  That’s all.”

“You appear,” Hollister said a little grimly, “to have acquired certain definite ideas.  It’s a pity they didn’t develop sooner.”

“Ideas only develop out of experience,” she said quietly.  “And our passions are born with us.”

She rose, shaking free the snow that clung to her coat.

“I feel better for getting all that steam off my chest,” she said.  “It’s better, since we must live here, that you and I should not keep up this game of pretence between ourselves.  Isn’t it, Robin?”

“Perhaps.  I don’t know.”  The old doubts troubled Hollister.  He was jealous of what he had attained, fearful of reviving the past, a little uncertain of this new turn.

“At any rate, you don’t hold a grudge against me, do you?” Myra asked.  “You can afford to be indifferent now.  You’ve found a mate, you’re playing a man’s part here.  You’re beating the game and getting some real satisfaction out of living.  You can afford to be above a grudge against me.”

“I don’t hold any grudge,” Hollister answered truthfully.

“I’m going down to the house, now,” Myra said.  “I wanted to talk to you openly, and I’m glad I did.  I think and think sometimes until I feel like a rat in a trap.  And you are the only one here I can really talk to.  You’ve been through the mill and you won’t misunderstand.”