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150 to help me do just that job. I won't put it in such terms, but I won't deceive him. I can't promise him any great profit; I can't even promise him his money back; I don't know, yet, how much I will need, but I want him to take a chance with me and I think he will. He is sending Phil Rowe to Pancake to look It up and he'll be here tonight—"

"And what has this to do with me?" There was defiance in the movement of Marcia's head and John looked at her rather startled by her evident wrath.

"Only this—that I can't offer you anything of what you want."

"And what else?" she waited. "That I'm—no longer satisfactory?"

"Please don't put it that way," he begged. His voice trembled and his face was drawn with suffering, because he hurt her. "We wouldn't have anything in common, Marcia; I couldn't give you what you wanted—and with you unhappy, where would I find happiness? It would be wretched for both of us. Don't you see that?"

"Yes, I see," she said and laughed again. She drew off her gloves nervously, with anger showing in the sharp little jerks of her hands. "You've changed, yes! And because you've changed, you assume the right to make me ridiculous in the eyes of my friends, to humiliate me, to delude and deceive me and make me suffer."

"Oh, Marcia—"

"You're not dumb, John Taylor! This isn't any sudden change in you; there's nothing spontaneous about it; it's deliberate and planned and I am—the deluded virgin!"

He tried to interrupt, but she stormed on, voice unsteady. "That is what it amounts to! You made love to me