"And Anne? and I?"
Jeff sat looking at her in an abstracted thoughtfulness.
"Anne?" he repeated. "You? I don't know. I shouldn't dare to say. I've no rights over Anne. She's so good I'm shy of her. But if I find you're a prisoner, Lydia, I mean you shall be liberated. If nature drives you on as it drives the rest of us to worship something—somebody—blindly, and he's not worth it, you bet your life I'll save you."
She leaned back against the step above, her face suddenly sick and miserable. What if she didn't want to be saved? the sick face asked him. Lydia was a truth-teller. She loved Jeff, and she plainly owned it to herself and felt surprisingly at ease over it. She was born to the dictates of nice tradition, but when that inner warmth told her she loved Jeff, even though he was bound to Esther, she didn't even hear tradition, if it spoke. All she could possibly do for Jeff, who unconsciously appealed to her every instant he looked at her with that deep frown between his brows, seemed little indeed. Should she say she loved him? That would be easy. But were his generalities about life strong enough to push her and her humilities aside? That was hard to bear.
"And," he was saying, "once we know we're prisoners, We can be free."
"How?" said Lydia hopefully. "Can we do the things we like?"
"No, by God! there's only one way of getting free, and that's by putting yourself under the law."
Lydia's heart fell beyond plummet's sounding. She did not want to put herself under any stricter law than that of heart's devotion. She had been listening to it a great deal, of late. They were sweet things it told her, and not wicked things, she thought, but all of humble service and unasked rewards.
Jeff was roaming on, beguiled by his new thoughts and the sound of his own voice.
"It's perfectly true what I used to write in that beggarly prison paper. The only way to be really free is to be bound—by law. It's the big paradox. Do you know what I'm going to do?"