tried to avoid yourself?" He murmured contritely as she went on. "I'm no more fitted to begin life as a poor man's wife than you are to—to work with your back! It isn't in me, dear. I feel small, mean and inferior. You've been so big and fine to me; I know you need me, but I'm thinking of the future. I don't want to mar our happiness by a bad beginning. I want to be with you. I'd give anything if I could marry you now and go into the woods with you. But what is a girl to do?" She held out a hand in query, which disengaged his close embrace. "I can't break away from the environment of my whole life, can I? After I've been schooled to tastes for beautiful things, after I've been taught to think that nothing is worth while, which is ugly, I'm not wholly to blame if I find my ideas fixed, am I?"
"Don't, Marcia! It's all such nonsense to be miserable over this."
"But I am! Don't you see that the two strongest impulses in my life are coming into conflict tonight? On one side is my love for you, on the other my unfitness to live a life that is cramped by the lack of money. I've been on the ragged edge of want ever since I can remember! Here I was with girls for friends who knew no scrimping, no ugliness, being taught to devote my whole soul to things that they thought were worth while, and, of course, things that only money could buy. And I lived in a home—Why, John, you and I never would have been here tonight if we hadn't established the practice of renting the apartment winters. Papa takes a room and mama and I come up here. We couldn't do it unless we leased the place we live in most of the year. We're here now because we had to rent until the middle of April this time! I have a car
