"I think I do care for him--as a friend," she decided.

"If he had only compelled me to find out the state of my own mind! What a strange man! I don't see how he can love me, for he knows me as I am.

Perhaps he really doesn't; sometimes I think he couldn't care for a woman as a woman wants to be cared for." Then as his face as she had last seen it rose before her, and her lips once more tingled, "Oh, yes, he _does_ care! And without his love how wretched I'd be! What a greedy I am--wanting his love and taking it, and giving nothing in return." That last more than half-sincere, though she, like not a few of her sisters in the "Woman's Paradise," otherwise known as the United States of America, had been spoiled into greatly exaggerating the value of her graciously condescending to let herself be loved.
And she was lonely without him.

If he could have come back at the end of a week or a month, he would have been received with an ardor that would have melted every real obstacle between them.

Also, it would have dissipated the far more obstructive imaginary obstacles from their infection with the latter-day vice of psychologizing about matters which lie in the realm of physiology, not of psychology.