“I would if I saw you sacrificing your life for a woman with a crazy-quilt past.”
“I’m not thinking of the past,” asserted Peter, “I’m thinking of the future.”
“That’s just it,” I tried to explain. “I’ll have to face that future with a clouded name. I’ll be a divorced woman. Ugh! I always thought of divorced women as something you wouldn’t quite care to sit next to at table. I hate divorce.”
“I’m a Quaker myself,” acknowledged Peter. “But I occasionally think of what Cobbett once said: ‘I don’t much like weasels. Yet I hate rats. Therefore I say success to the weasels!’”
“I don’t see what weasels have to do with it,” I complained.
“Putting one’s house in order again may sometimes be as beneficent as surgery,” contended Peter.
“And sometimes as painful,” I added. 378
“Yet there’s no mistake like not cleaning up old mistakes.”
“But I hate it,” I told him. “It all seems so—so cheap.”
“On the contrary,” corrected Peter, “it’s rather costly.” He pulled up across my path and made me come to a stop. “My dear,” he said, very solemn again, “I know the stuff you’re made of. I know you’ve got to climb to the light by a path of your own choosing. And you have to see the light with your own eyes. But I’m willing to wait. I have waited, a very long time. But there’s one fact you’ve got to face: I love you too much ever to dream of giving you up.”