“I am so sad,” Marian said at last. “But I am so happy too. What has come over me? But--you will work on, won’t you? And you will accomplish everything. Yes, I am sure you will.”
“Oh, I’ll work--in my own way. And I’ll get a good deal of what I want. But not everything. You say you can’t understand yourself. No more can I understand myself. I thought my purpose fixed. I knew that I had nothing to do with marrying and giving in marriage, so I kept away from danger. And here, as miraculously as if a thunderbolt had dropped from this open winter sky, here is--you.”
They were in the Avenue again--“the awakening,” Howard said as the flood of carriages rolled about them.
“You will win,” she repeated, when they were almost at Forty-seventh Street. “You will be famous.”
“Probably not. The price for fame may be too big.”
“The price? But you are willing to work?”
“Work--yes. But not to lie, not to cheat, not to exchange self-respect for self-contempt--at least, I think, I hope not.”
“It may not be if I am free--free to meet every situation as it arises, with no responsibility for others resting upon me in the decision. If I had a wife, how could I be free? I might be forced to sell myself--not for fame but for a bare living. Suppose choice between freedom with poverty and comfort with self-contempt were put squarely at me, and I a married man. She would decide, wouldn’t she?”
“Yes, and if she were the right sort of a woman, decide instantly for self-respect.”
“Of course--if I asked her. But do you imagine that when a man loves a woman he lets her know?”
“It would be a crime not to let her know.”
“It would be a greater crime to put her to the test--if she were a woman brought up, say, as you have been.”
“How can you say that? How can you so overestimate the value of mere incidentals?”
“How can I? Because I have known poverty--have known what it was to look want in the face. Because I have seen women, brought up as you have been, crawling miserably about in the sloughs of poverty. Because I have seen the weaknesses of human nature and know that they exist in me--yes, and in you, for all your standing there so strong and arrogant and self-reliant. It is easy to talk of misery when one does not understand it. It is easy to be the martyr of an hour or a day. But to drag into a sordid and squalid martyrdom the woman one loves--well, the man does not live who would do it, if he knew what I know, had seen what I have seen. No, love is a luxury of the rich and the poor and the steady-going. It is not for my kind, not for me.”