A woman whom you can shape.  And you won’t really love her, but only just so much of her as may become the incarnation of you.  Well, I’m not that kind of woman.  I might have been, had you been different.  I’m not at all sure.  Certainly I’m not that kind now, even though I know in my heart that the sort of career you have made for yourself, and that I intend to make for myself is all dross.  But now I can’t do without it.”

“And yet you are going to marry Hambleton Durrett!” I said.

She understood me, although I regretted my words at once.

“Yes, I am going to marry him.”  There was a shade of bitterness, of defiance in her voice.  “Surely you are not offering me the—­the other thing, now.  Oh, Hugh!”

“I am willing to abandon it all, Nancy.”

“No,” she said, “you’re not, and I’m not.  What you can’t see and won’t see is that it has become part of you.  Oh, you are successful, you will be more and more successful.  And you think I should be somebody, as your wife, Hugh, more perhaps, eventually, than I shall be as Hambleton’s.  But I should be nobody, too.  I couldn’t stand it now, my dear.  You must realize that as soon as you have time to think it over.  We shall be friends.”

The sudden gentleness in her voice pierced me through and through.  She held out her hand.  Something in her grasp spoke of a resolution which could not be shaken.

“And besides,” she added sadly, “I don’t love you any more, Hugh.  I’m mourning for something that’s gone.  I wanted to have just this one talk with you.  But we shan’t mention it again,—­we’ll close the book."...

At that I fled out of the house, and at first the thought of her as another man’s wife, as Hambleton Durrett’s wife, was seemingly not to be borne.  It was incredible!  “We’ll close the book.”  I found myself repeating the phrase; and it seemed then as though something within me I had believed dead—­something that formerly had been all of me—­had revived again to throb with pain.

It is not surprising that the acuteness of my suffering was of short duration, though I remember certain sharp twinges when the announcement of the engagement burst on the city.  There was much controversy over the question as to whether or not Ham Durrett’s reform would be permanent; but most people were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt; it was time he settled down and took the position in the community that was to be expected of one of his name; and as for Nancy, it was generally agreed that she had done well for herself.  She was not made for poverty—­and who so well as she was fitted for the social leadership of our community?