Sibylla spoke to him, sadly now.
"You can't refuse. It's put out of your power. This thing must be. It has become inevitable. There's no use in talking of refusing the consequences. They won't be as bad as you think."
"It's not inevitable; it's not out of my power. It's entirely in my power to accept your consequences or not to accept them, to face them or not to face them; and I have decided. I won't be, and I won't be known as, what you're making me; and your son shan't have to confess you his mother before men."
Young Blake looked at him with a puzzled impatience; Sibylla with a slow pondering glance. She twisted a ring on her finger as she asked:
"What do you mean by that?"
"In this world nothing need happen to us that we don't choose to bear, and nothing to those who are in our power that we don't choose to accept for them."
"What are you talking about?" asked Blake fretfully. "It sounds all nonsense to me."
He leant back with a scornful toss of his head. This sort of thing had lasted long enough, in his opinion.
"Tell me what you mean," said Sibylla, leaning forward across the table.
Grantley announced the resolve that possessed him, born of those bitter meditations, of those intolerable pictures of the future which had formed themselves in his mind as he battled through the storm to Fairhaven. He uttered it not as a threat, but as a warning; it was, as he had said, fair that she should understand.