“You know I only asked to serve—to help—to care for you.”
“You would think it wrong, then, to be unfaithful, technically, to your wife?”
“Wrong?” His brow showed the Saint-Bernard-puppy knot of perplexity. “It’s not a question of wrong. Wrongness lies only in the sort of love. Real love is sacred in all its expressions of itself; my ideal of love, just because it includes that one, can do without it.”
“But, on your theory, why should it do without it?” Mrs. Dallas, all mildness, inquired.
His mind was driven back to those questionings in the studio, when he had thought of the incongruous yet allied themes of passion and perambulators, and groped again, angrily, in the same obscurity. “It’s—it’s—a matter of convenience,” he found, frowning; “it—it wouldn’t work in with other beautiful things. It wouldn’t be convenient.”
“I’m glad to hear you find such a reasonable objection,” said Mrs. Dallas. “There could hardly be a better one. It wouldn’t be at all convenient. Though, I gather, if it could be made convenient, you still think that Marian would have nothing to complain of.”
“I don’t know why you are trying to pin me down like this.” Rupert, stooping, gathered some flakes of stone from the path and scattered them with a sharp gesture that expressed his exasperation. “You know what I believe. Love is free, free as air and sunshine. How can one stop one’s self from loving? Why should one? And if our love, yours and mine, could mean that complete relation, then, yes, the ideal thing, the really ideal thing, would be for Marian to feel it right and beautiful and to be glad that there should be two perfected and complete relations instead of one. As it is, that inclusive vision isn’t asked of her.”
“She’s not, in fact, to be asked to be a Mormon,” Mrs. Dallas remarked. “All that she has to put up with is that her husband should be in love, platonically, with another woman, and should have ceased to be in love with her. It’s hard, you know, when some one has been in love with you, to give it up.”
“But I have not ceased to love Marian!” Rupert cried. “Why should you suppose it? My love for you doesn’t shut out my love for her. It’s a vulgar old remnant of sexual savagery to think it does. A mother doesn’t love one child the less for loving another. Why can’t people purify and widen their minds by looking at the truth?—That jeer about Mormons is unworthy of you. Marriage is a prison unless husband and wife are both free to go on giving and growing. What does love mean but growth?”
Mrs. Dallas’s eyes had drifted away to her beds of carnations and they now rested on them for a little while. Rupert took up his hat and fanned himself. He was hot, and very miserable.