“And do you love him?”
“Love him! What; as you loved her whom you have lost?—as she loved you when she clung to you before she went? No; certainly not. I shall never know anything of that love.”
“And is he good?”
“He is a hard man. Men become hard when they deal in money as he has done. He was home five years since, and I swore to myself that I would not marry him. But his letters to me are kind.”
Forrest sat silent for a minute or two, for they were up in the bow again, seated on the sail that was bound round the bowsprit, and then he answered her, “A woman should never marry a man unless she loves him.”
“Ah,” says she, “of course you will condemn me. That is the way in which women are always treated. They have no choice given them, and are then scolded for choosing wrongly.”
“But you might have refused him.”
“No; I could not. I cannot make you understand the whole,—how it first came about that the marriage was proposed, and agreed to by me under certain conditions. Those conditions have come about, and I am now bound to him. I have taken his money and have no escape. It is easy to say that a woman should not marry without love, as easy as it is to say that a man should not starve. But there are men who starve,—starve although they work hard.”
“I did not mean to judge you, Miss Viner.”
“But I judge myself, and condemn myself so often. Where should I be in half-an-hour from this if I were to throw myself forward into the sea? I often long to do it. Don’t you feel tempted sometimes to put an end to it all?”