"Dear child, I don't object to anything to-day," he replied. "As long as I am allowed to marry you, I am quite willing to let other men please themselves."
"But tell me seriously—do you?"
"Must I be serious? Well, let me think. No, I don't know that I object—there is so very little that I object to, you see, in the way of things that people want to do—but I think, perhaps, that, all things being equal, a man would not choose to marry so near a blood relation."
"You do think it wrong, then?"
"I think it not only wrong but utterly preposterous and indefensible," he said, "that it should be lawful and virtuous for a man to marry his first cousin and wicked and indecent to marry his sister-in-law—or his aunt-in-law for the matter of that—or any other free woman who has no connection with him except through other people's marriages. If a legal restriction in such matters can ever be necessary or justifiable, it should be in the way of preventing the union of people of the same blood. Sense and the laws of physiology have something to say to that—they have nothing whatever to say to the relations that are of no kin to each other. Them's my sentiments, Miss King, if you particularly wish to know them."
Elizabeth put her knife and fork together on her plate softly. It was a gesture of elaborate caution, meant to cover her conscious agitation. "Then you would not—if it were your own case—marry your cousin?" she asked, after a pause, in a very small and gentle voice. He was studying the menu on her behalf, and wondering if the strawberries and cream would be fresh. Consequently he did not notice how pale she had grown, all of a sudden.
"Well," he said, "you see I have no cousin, to begin with. And if I had I could not possibly want to marry her, since I am going to marry you to-morrow, and a man is only allowed to have one wife at a time. So my own case doesn't come in."
"But if I had been your cousin?" she urged, breathlessly, but with her eyes on her plate. "Supposing, for the sake of argument, that I had been of your blood—would you still have had me?"
"Ah!" he said, laughing, "that is, indeed, a home question."
"Would you?" she persisted.