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.
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