"Oh yes, I do," he said, slowly; "only when you've gone in for an unconventional thing you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb."
"I don't agree with you. Nothing more than the unconventional requires a nicely discriminating taste; and it's no use being more violent than you can help. You and Dorothea are making a match that sets the rules of your world at defiance, but you may as well avail yourselves of any little mitigation that comes to hand. Life is going to be hard enough for you as it is—"
"Oh, I don't know about that. They can't do anything to us—"
"Not to you, perhaps, because you're a man. But they can to Dorothea, and they will. This is just one of those queer situations in which you'll get the credit and she'll get the blame. You can always make a poem on Young Lochinvar, when it's less easy to approve of the damsel who springs to the pillion behind him. I don't pretend to account for this idiosyncrasy of human nature; I merely state it as a fact. Society will forget that you ran away with Dorothea, but it will never forget that she ran away with you."
"H'm!"
"But I don't see that that need distress you. You wouldn't care; and as for Dorothea, she's got the pluck of a soldier. Depend upon it, she sees the whole situation already, and is prepared to face it. That's part of the difference between a woman and a man. You can go into a thing like this without looking ahead, because you know that, whatever the opposition, you can keep it down. A woman is too weak for that. She must count every danger beforehand. Dorothea has done that. This isn't going to be a leap in the dark for her; it wouldn't be for any girl of her intelligence and social instincts. She knows what she's doing, and she's doing it for you. She has made her sacrifice, and made it willingly, before she consented to take this step at all. She crossed her Rubicon without saying anything to you about it, and you needn't consider her any more."
"Well, I like that!" he said, in an injured tone, thrusting his hands into his overcoat pockets and beginning to move along the terrace.
"Yes; I thought you would," she agreed, walking by his side. "It shows what she's willing to give up for you. It shows even more than that. It shows how she loves you. Dorothea is not a girl who holds society lightly, and if she renounces it—"
"Oh, but, come now, Mrs. Eveleth! It isn't going to be as bad as that."
"It isn't going to be as bad as anything. Bad is not the word. When I speak of renouncing society, of course I only mean renouncing—the best. There will always be some people toWell, you remember Dumas' comparison of the sixpenny and the six-shilling peaches. If you can't have the latter, you will be able to afford the former."