"Stephen dear, can I possibly marry you? Can I?"
"Why not? Why not make the adventure of life with me? Dare!"
She looked down on me. She was sitting upon a parapet of the brickwork and I was below her. She seemed to be weighing possibilities.
"Why not?" I cried. "Even now. Why not run away with me, throw our two lives together? Do as lovers have dared to do since the beginning of things! Let us go somewhere together----"
"But Stephen," she asked softly, "_where_?"
She spoke as an elder might do to a child. "No! tell me where--exactly. Where would it be? Where should we go? How should we live? Tell me. Make me see it, Stephen."
"You are too cruel to me, Mary," I said. "How can I--on the spur of the moment--arrange----?"
"But dear, suppose it was somewhere very grimy and narrow! Something--like some of those back streets I came through to get here. Suppose it was some dreadful place. And you had no money. And we were both worried and miserable. One gets ill in such places. If I loved you, Stephen--I mean if you and I--if you and I were to be together, I should want it to be in sunshine, I should want it to be among beautiful forests and mountains. Somewhere very beautiful...."
"Because--to-day I know. There are no such places in the world for us. Stephen, they are dreams."
"For three years now," I said, "I have dreamed such dreams.
"Oh!" I cried out, stung by my own words, "but this is cowardice! Why should we submit to this old world! Why should we give up--things you have dreamed as well as I! You said once--to hear my voice--calling in the morning.... Let us take each other, Mary, now. _Now!_ Let us take each other, and"--I still remember my impotent phrase--"afterwards count the cost!"
"If I were a queen," said Mary. "But you see I am not a queen." ...
So we talked in fragments and snatches of argument, and all she said made me see more clearly the large hopelessness of my desire. "At least," I urged, "do not marry Justin now. Give me a chance. Give me three years, Mary, three short years, to work, to do something!"
She knew so clearly now the quality of her own intentions.
"Dear Stephen," she explained, "if I were to come away with you and marry you, in just a little time I should cease to be your lover, I should be your squaw. I should have to share your worries and make your coffee--and disappoint you, disappoint you and fail you in a hundred ways. Think! Should I be any good as a squaw? How can one love when one knows the coffee isn't what it should be, and one is giving one's lover indigestion? And I don't _want_ to be your squaw. I don't want that at all. It isn't how I feel for you. I don't _want_ to be your servant and your possession."