"How can I say, when I've told you I see all the sides? Of
course," Susy added hastily, " I couldn't live as they do for a
week. But it's wonderful how little it's dimmed them."

"Certainly Nat was never more coruscating. And she keeps it up
even better." He reflected. "We do them good, I daresay."

"Yes--or they us. I wonder which?"

After that, he seemed to remember that they sat a long time
silent, and that his next utterance was a boyish outburst
against the tyranny of the existing order of things, abruptly
followed by the passionate query why, since he and she couldn't
alter it, and since they both had the habit of looking at facts
as they were, they wouldn't be utter fools not to take their
chance of being happy in the only way that was open to them, To
this challenge he did not recall Susy's making any definite
answer; but after another interval, in which all the world
seemed framed in a sudden kiss, he heard her murmur to herself
in a brooding tone: "I don't suppose it's ever been tried
before; but we might--." And then and there she had laid before
him the very experiment they had since hazarded.

She would have none of surreptitious bliss, she began by
declaring; and she set forth her reasons with her usual lucid
impartiality. In the first place, she should have to marry some
day, and when she made the bargain she meant it to be an honest
one; and secondly, in the matter of love, she would never give
herself to anyone she did not really care for, and if such
happiness ever came to her she did not want it shorn of half its