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"Perhaps not," she answered; and hearing her say it, his future life seemed to him as forlorn as the landscape.

"What will you do? What will become of you? What strange transformation has taken place in you?"

"If—— But what is the use of going over it again?"

"If what?"

"What would you have me do? Marriage would only ruin you, Owen, make you very unhappy. Why do you want me to enter on a life which I feel isn't mine, and which could only end in disaster for both of us."

He asked her why it would end in disaster, and she answered, "It is impossible to lay bare one's whole heart. When one changes one's ideas one changes one's friends."

"Because one's friends are only the embodiment of one's ideas. But I cannot admit that you would be unhappy as my wife."

"Everybody is unhappy when they are not doing what Nature intended them to do."

"And what did Nature intend you to do? Only to sing operas?"

"I should be sorry to think Nature intended me for nothing else. Would you have me go on singing operas? I don't want to appear unreasonable, but how could I go on singing even if I wished to go on? The taste has changed; you will admit that light opera is the fashion, and I shouldn't succeed in light opera. Whatever I do you praise, but you know in the bottom of your heart there are only a few parts which I play well. You may deceive yourself, you do so because you wish to do so, but I have no wish to deceive myself and I know that I was never a great singer; a good singer, an (p. 025) interesting singer in certain parts if you like, but no more. You will admit that?"