She gazed at him and he saw that she weighed the idea. “But you’d be shackled then,” she said, and her thoughts were evidently clear. “It would mean, besides, that you would lose them.”
“As to being shackled,” Oldmeadow, still grimly, met the difficulty, “that’s of no moment. I’m the snuffy, snappy bachelor type, you remember, and I don’t suppose I’d ever have married. As to losing them, I certainly should.”
“We mustn’t think of it then,” said Adrienne. “You and Barney and Nancy mustn’t lose each other.”
“But we should in either way. I could hardly take up my friendship with them again after Barney had divorced you on account of me, even if you and I didn’t marry. It would give the whole thing away, if it were possible for them to meet me again. As I say, they’d feel they had no right to their freedom on such a fake as that.”
“They couldn’t feel really free unless some one had really committed adultery for their sakes?” Again Adrienne smiled with her faint bitterness and he wondered if a man and woman had ever before had a more astonishing conversation. “That seems to me to be asking for a little too much icing on your cake. Of course it couldn’t be a nice, new, snowy wedding-cake; poor Mrs. Chadwick wouldn’t like it at all, nor Mrs. Averil; but it would be the best we could do for them; and I should think that when people love each other and are the right people for each other they’d be thankful for any kind of cake. Even if it were a good deal burned around the edges,” Adrienne finished, her slight bitterness evidently finding satisfaction in the simile.
“But they wouldn’t see it at all like that,” said Oldmeadow, now with unalloyed gravity. “They’d see it as a cake they had stolen; a cake they had no right to. It’s a question of the laws we live under. Not of personal, but of public integrity. They couldn’t profit by a hoodwinked law. It’s that that would spoil things for them. According to the law they’d have no right to their freedom. And, now that I am speaking seriously, it’s that I feel, too. What you are asking of me, my dear friend, is no more nor less than a felony.”
She meditated, unmoved, still almost sternly, turning her eyes from him and leaning her elbow on the window-sill, her head upon her hand. “I see,” she said at last. “For people who mind about the law, I see that it would spoil it. I don’t mind. I think the law’s there to force us to be kind and just to each other if we won’t be by ourselves. If the law gets tied up in such a foolish knot as to say that people may sin to set other people free, but mayn’t pretend to sin, I think we have a right to help it out and to make it do good against its own will. I don’t mind the law; luckily for them. Because I won’t go back from it now. I won’t leave them there, loving each other but never knowing the fullness of love. I won’t give up a thing I feel right because other people feel it wrong. So I must find somebody else.”
Oldmeadow looked at her in a culminated and wholly unpleasant astonishment. “Somebody else? Who could there be?”
“You may well ask,” Adrienne remarked, glancing round at him with a touch of mild asperity. “You are the only completely right person, because only you and I feel enough for them to do it for them. What I must do now is to find some one who would feel enough, just for me, to do it for me. It makes it more unfair for him, doesn’t it. He’ll have only the one friend to help. But on the other hand it will leave them without a scruple. They’d know from the beginning that with you and me it was a fake; but with him it might seem quite probable. Yes; it’s strange; I had a letter from him only yesterday. I shouldn’t have thought of him otherwise. I might have had to give up. But the more I think,” Adrienne meditated intently, her head on her hand, her eyes turned on the prospect outside, “the more I seem to see that Hamilton Prentiss is the only other chance.”
“Hamilton Prentiss?” Oldmeadow echoed faintly.