“Why impossible?” she asked, and her voice was almost stern.
“You can’t smirch yourself like that.” It was only one reason; but it was the first that came to him.
“I?” she stared. “I don’t think it is to be smirched. I shall know why I do it.”
“Other people won’t know. Other people will think you smirched.”
“No one I care for. Everyone I care for will understand.”
“But to the world at large? Your name? Your reputation?” Oldmeadow protested. “Do they mean nothing to you?”
A faintly bitter humour touched her lips. “You’ve always taken the side of the world in all our controversies, haven’t you, Mr. Oldmeadow? and you were probably right and I was probably wrong; but not because of what the world would think. I know I’m right now, and those words: name: reputation—mean nothing to me. The world and I haven’t much to do with each other. A divorced wife can run soup-kitchens and fever hospitals just as well as the most unsmirched woman of the world. I’m not likely to want to be presented at courts, am I? Don’t think of me, please. It’s not a question of me. Only of you. Will you do it?”
“I couldn’t possibly do it,” said Oldmeadow, and he was still hardly taking her monstrous proposal seriously.
“Why not?” she asked, scrutinizing him. “It’s not that you mind about your name and reputation, is it?”
“Not much. Perhaps not much,” said Oldmeadow; “but about theirs. That’s what you don’t see. That it would be impossible for them. You don’t see how unique you are; how unlike other people. Nancy and Barney couldn’t marry on a fake. The only way out,” said Oldmeadow, looking at her with an edge of ironic grimness in his contemplation, “if one were really to consider it, would be for you to marry me afterwards and for us to disappear.”