“It wasn’t consideration for her family that held me back.”
“What was it?”
Pete found a moral scruple was a difficult motive to avow.
“It was Mathilde herself. That would not have been treating her as an equal.”
“You intend always to treat her as an equal?”
Wayne was ashamed to find how difficult it was to answer truthfully. The tone of the question gave him no clue to the speaker’s own thoughts.
“Yes, I do,” he said; and then blurted out hastily, “Don’t you believe in treating a woman as an equal?”
“I believe in treating her exactly as she wants to be treated.”
“But every one wants to be treated as an equal, if they’re any good.” Farron smiled, showing those blue-white teeth for an instant, and Wayne, feeling he was not quite doing himself justice, added, “I call that just ordinary respect, you know, and I could not love any one I didn’t respect. Could you?”
The question was, or Farron chose to consider it, a purely rhetorical one.