"I might make you understand better if I said yes, but it would not be
true. I'm not in love with any individual, but I know clearly the type of
woman I could fall in love with, and it most emphatically is not Miss
Fenimer's."

"Yet so many men have fallen in love with her."

"Oh, I see her beauty; I even feel her charm; but to marry her, no."

"Think of the prestige her beauty and position--"

"My dear Laura, what position? Social position as represented by the
hectic triviality of the last few days? Thank you, no, again."

"Dear Max," said his cousin more seriously than she had hitherto spoken,
"you know I would not want you to do anything that I thought would make
you unhappy. But this wouldn't. I know Christine better than you do. I
know that under all her worldliness and hardness there is a vein of
devotion and sweetness--"

"Very likely there is. But it would not be brought out by a mercenary
marriage with a man who cared nothing for her. If that is all you have to
say, Laura, let's end an interview which hasn't been very pleasant for
either of us."

"Oh, Max, how can you abandon that lovely creature to some tragic
future?"

"You know quite well she is going to do nothing more tragic than to
marry Hickson."