Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/160

150 "You!" was his reply.

The weariness went out of her face at the vibrata of feeling which had crept into that one expository cry.

"But you can have me, Beloved One, for the asking, every ounce of my body and soul. It's all yours!"

"That's not enough," he surprised her by replying.

"That would seem a great deal to most men," she told him, after a moment of silence.

"Then you'll have to regard me as different to most men," he persisted.

"In what way?"

"In wanting to keep our love sane and clean and holy," he found himself saying. " In not having it dragged down to any Muselli and Nona Maynelle plane — and ending as you saw theirs end."

She sat up, thinking this over.

"I'm afraid, Owen, I'm more of a barbarian than you are. It doesn't seem the least bit important to me, so long as we're true to each other, whether we've scratched our names in some fat old city clerk's register or not. That may make" —

"Then if it's that trivial to you," he interrupted, "why can't you respect my wishes in the matter?"

"But it's not so trivial, in one way. There's my work to think of. People aren't interested in a married stage-star. They're not, at least, unless she's a great artist, and I know well enough I'm not that, and never can be. And Krassler would never stand for it, even from the business view-point. It would end everything."

"Then why not let it, if that's the absurd condition it imposes on you?" he demanded through the dust of his own cyclonic upheavals. He failed to decipher latent reproof in the quick look which she threw at him over her shoulder.

"Are you making this," she said with an arrested judicial note in her voice, "a choice between you or my work?"