“Why shouldn’t I marry him?” she demanded.

“Because he’s not good enough for you.”

“Good!” she exclaimed, and laughed.  “He loves me.  He wants me without reservation or calculation.”  There was a sting in this.  “And is he any worse,” she asked slowly, “than many others who might be mentioned?”

“No,” I agreed.  I did not intend to be led into the thankless and disagreeable position of condemning Hambleton Durrett.  “But why have you waited all these years if you did not mean to marry a man of ability, a man who has made something of himself?”

“A man like you, Hugh?” she said gently.

I flushed.

“That isn’t quite fair, Nancy.”

“What are you working for?” she suddenly inquired, straightening up.

“What any man works for, I suppose.”

“Ah, there you have hit it,—­what any man works for in our world.  Power,—­personal power.  You want to be somebody,—­isn’t that it?  Not the noblest ambition, you’ll have to admit,—­not the kind of thing we used to dream about, when we did dream.  Well, when we find we can’t realize our dreams, we take the next best thing.  And I fail to see why you should blame me for taking it when you yourself have taken it.  Hambleton Durrett can give it to me.  He’ll accept me on my own terms, he won’t interfere with me, I shan’t be disillusionized,—­and I shall have a position which I could not hope to have if I remained unmarried, a very marked position as Hambleton Durrett’s wife.  I am thirty, you know.”

Her frankness appalled me.

“The trouble with you, Hugh, is that you still deceive yourself.  You throw a glamour over things.  You want to keep your cake and eat it too.

“I don’t see why you say that.  And marriage especially—­”

She took me up.

“Marriage!  What other career is open to a woman?  Unless she is married, and married well, according to the money standard you men have set up, she is nobody.  We can’t all be Florence Nightingales, and I am unable to imagine myself a Julia Ward Howe or a Harriet Beecher Stowe.  What is left?  Nothing but marriage.  I’m hard and cynical, you will say, but I have thought, and I’m not afraid, as I have told you, to look things in the face.  There are very few women, I think, who would not take the real thing if they had the chance before it were too late, who wouldn’t be willing to do their own cooking in order to get it.”

She fell silent suddenly.  I began to pace the room.

“For God’s sake, don’t do this, Nancy!” I begged.

But she continued to stare into the fire, as though she had not heard me.

“If you had made up your mind to do it, why did you tell me?” I asked.

“Sentiment, I suppose.  I am paying a tribute to what I once was, to what you once were,” she said.  A—­a sort of good-bye to sentiment.”

“Nancy!” I said hoarsely.

She shook her head.