“I’d never care for a man who would admit that.”

“There never was a woman in the world loved a man who did not.”

“Oh, always I try to analyze these things,” she went on desperately, facing him, her eyes somber, her face aglow, her attitude tense.  “I try to look in my mirror and I demand of what I see there.  ’What are you?” I say.  ‘What is this that I see?’ Why, I can see that a woman might love her own beauty for itself.  Yes, I love my beauty.  But I don’t see how a woman could care for a man who only cared for that,—­what she saw in her mirror, don’t you know?”

“Any price, for just that!” he said grimly.

“No, no!  You would not.  Don’t say that!  I so much want you to be bigger than that.”

“The woman you see in your mirror would be cheap at any cost.”

“But a man even like yourself.  Sir, would be very cheap, if his price was such as you say.  No turncoat could win me—­I’d love him more on his own side yonder threefold wall, with his convictions, than on my side without them.  I couldn’t be bought cheap as that, nor by a cheap man.  I’d never love a man who held himself cheap.

“But then,” she added, casting back at him one of his own earlier speeches, “if you only thought as I did, what could not we two do together—­for the cause of those human blades of grass—­so soon cut down?  Ah, life is so little, so short!”

“No!  No!  Stop!” he cried out.  “Ah, now is the torture—­now you turn the wheel.  I can not recant!  I can not give up my convictions, or my love, either one; and yet—­I’m not sure I’m going to have left either one.  It’s hell, that’s what’s left for me.  But listen!  What for those that grow as flowers, tall, beautiful, there among the grass that is cut down—­should they perish from the earth?  For what were such as they made, tall and beautiful?—­poppies, mystic, drug-like, delirium producing?  Is that it—­is that your purpose in life, then, after all?  You—­what you see in your mirror there—­is it the purpose of that being—­so beautiful, so beautiful—­to waste itself, all through life, over some vague and abstract thing out of which no good can come?  Is that all?  My God!  Much as I love you, I’d rather see you marry some other man than think of you never married at all.  God never meant a flower such as you to wither, to die, to be wasted.  Why, look at you!  Look . . . at . . . you!  And you say you are to be wasted!  God never meant it so, you beauty, you wonderful woman!”

Even as she was about to speak, drawn by the passion of him, the agony of his cry, there came to the ears of both an arresting sound—­one which it seemed to Josephine was not wholly strange to her ears.  It was like the cry of a babe, a child’s wail, difficult to locate, indefinite in distance.

“What was it?” she whispered.  “Did you hear?”

He made no answer, except to walk to her straight and take her by the arms, looking sadly, mournfully into her face.