'
'No doubt! Of course you are terribly in love.'
'Very thoroughly in love, I think I am.'
'For the tenth time, I should say.'
'For the second only. I don't regard myself as a monument of
constancy, but I think I am less fickle than some other people.'
'Meaning me?'
'Not especially.'
'Frank, that is ill-natured, and almost unmanly,--and false also.
When have been I fickle? You say that there was one before with you.
I say that thee has never really been one with me at all. No one
knows that better than yourself. I cannot afford to be in love
till I am quite sure that the man is fit to be, and will be, my
husband.
'I doubt sometimes whether you are capable of being in love with
anyone.'
'I think I am,' she said, very gently. 'But I am at any rate
capable of not being in love till I wish it. Come, Frank, do not
quarrel with me. You know,--you ought to know,--that I should have
loved you had not been that such love would have been bad for both
of us.'
'It is a kind of self-restraint I do not understand.'
'Because you are not a woman.
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