"Well, call me by it now," she answered, still smiling. She stood up and moved toward him. "Friends do that, don't they? But we can't go beyond friendship—"

"This has got nothing to do with friendship."

"Oh, what a mistake, Vance! It includes friendship—" She spoke very low, as if what she had to say were difficult; but her eyes did not leave him. "It includes everything," she said.

"Well, then—if it does?"

"Only, what we've got to do is to choose—take what we may, and leave the rest."

"Never, never! I can't leave it." He was looking at her almost sternly. "Can you?" he challenged her.

"Yes," she said, facing him resolutely.

"Ah—then you don't care!"

"Call it that, then. At least I've cared for our friendship… ."

"Friendship! Friendship! If that means seeing you for a few minutes every now and then, and talking to you this way, with half the room between us, when what I want is nothing else than all of you—all your time, all your thoughts, all yourself—then I don't give a curse for your friendship."

She said nothing, and his words were flung back at him from the dead wall of her silence. He didn't give a curse for her friendship! He had said that! When her friendship had been all of life to him, the breath of his nostrils, the sight of his eyes—well, and it was true nevertheless that he wanted no more of it, or rather that it had ceased to exist for him, and that henceforth she must be the world's length away from him, or else in his arms.

"You don't understand—I want to kiss you," he stammered, looking at her with desperate eyes.

"That's why I say—we can't go on."

"Can't—why?"

She hesitated, and he saw that the hand resting on the back of her chair trembled a little.

"Because you don't want to?" he burst out.

"Because I won't take a lover while I have a husband—or while my lover has a wife," she said precipitately.

Vance stood motionless. A moment before his thoughts had enveloped her in a million caressing touches, soul had seemed to clasp soul as body would presently embrace body, the distance between them had vanished in the hallucinating fusion of sight and touch. There had been no other world than that which the quiet room built in about them, no human beings in it but themselves. And now, abruptly thrust across the plane on which they stood, the other crowded grimacing world had pushed itself in, and between them stood Laura Lou and the sordid boarding house room, the moneylenders and the unfinished book, Mrs. Hubbard and the washing bills, and the account that Laura Lou was always running up at the druggist's …

"And because I can't leave my husband—any more than you can leave your wife… ."