"And aren't you tired sometimes of the struggle?"

"Tired? Yes, everybody is tired I suppose. But it is a glorious
profession. And would you want me to be dependent, Philip?"

"Well, yes, a little," said Philip, feeling his way towards what he
wanted to say.

"On what, for instance, just now?" asked Ruth, a little maliciously
Philip thought.

"Why, on----" he couldn't quite say it, for it occurred to him that he was
a poor stick for any body to lean on in the present state of his fortune,
and that the woman before him was at least as independent as he was.

"I don't mean depend," he began again. "But I love you, that's all. Am
I nothing--to you?" And Philip looked a little defiant, and as if he had
said something that ought to brush away all the sophistries of obligation
on either side, between man and woman.

Perhaps Ruth saw this. Perhaps she saw that her own theories of a
certain equality of power, which ought to precede a union of two hearts,
might be pushed too far. Perhaps she had felt sometimes her own weakness
and the need after all of so dear a sympathy and so tender an interest
confessed, as that which Philip could give. Whatever moved her--the
riddle is as old as creation--she simply looked up to Philip and said in
a low voice, "Everything."

And Philip clasping both her hands in his, and looking down into her
eyes, which drank in all his tenderness with the thirst of a true woman's