He remained silent a moment, and then he said:
"But suppose a man and a woman loved each other and wished to enter into the married state, and yet were so placed that it was impossible for their union to have the sanction of either the law or church, what then?"
Grace laid down her work and, shaking her head, looked gravely at her interlocutor:
"It is difficult to answer such a question offhand," she said. "I think it would depend altogether on the circumstances and chiefly on the personal views of those directly concerned. Some people scoff at marriage. Among them are many of my own sex. They regard marriage merely as a time-honored, worn out convention which really means nothing. They get married, of course, not because they believe in it as an institution, but as a matter of form, because their mothers did it before them, because it is the thing to do. But not unreasonably, they argue, that nowadays when it is so easy to obtain a divorce on the most trivial pretext, there is not much left about marriage that is sacred and binding."
He listened attentively. When she ceased speaking, he asked quietly:
"And what is your view? Do you indorse these opinions?"
"No, I do not," she replied, meeting his steady gaze frankly. "I believe in marriage. I think it is the noblest gift that civilization has bequeathed to the human race. It marks the great divide between man and the brute. More than that, it protects the woman who is, naturally, the weaker, and, above all, it protects the offspring."
"You are right," he rejoined quickly, "yet isn't it curious that man seems happiest under monogamy, which is directly contrary to nature. Man is naturally polygamous."
"Ah, but that is only brute love. It rests on nothing tangible. Like a tiny flame, it is extinguished by the first adverse breath of wind. Man thinks he is polygamous. But that is only the beast in him—the beast with which his better and higher nature is ever at war. The superior man learns to control his appetites, the baser man indulges them, and therefore is nearer to the tailed ancestry from which he originally sprang. That is not love as I understand it."
He leaned quickly forward.