"I don't see how."
"We've been man and wife—"
"That's the very reason. No two people seem to me so far apart as those who've been man and wife—and aren't so any longer."
"And yet, in a way, no two are so near together."
Her eyes were full of mute questioning. He made no attempt to approach her, but in leaning across the upholstered arm of his seat he seemed to overcome some of the distance between them.
"No two are so near together," he went on, "for the very reason that when they're separated outwardly they're bound the more closely by the things of the heart and the soul and the spirit. After all, those are the ties that count. The legal dissolving of bonds and making of new ones is only superficial. It hasn't put you and me asunder—not the you and me," he hurried on, as something in her expression and attitude seemed to indicate dissent, "not the you and me that are really essential. No court and no judge could dissolve the union we entered into when you were twenty-one and I was twenty-seven, and our two lives melted into each other like the flowing together of two streams. Neither judge nor court can resolve into their original waters the rivers that have already become one."
She smiled faintly, perhaps bitterly. "Doesn't your figure of speech carry you too far? In our case the judge and the court were only incidental. What really dissolved our union was—"
"I know what you're going to say. And it was against the letter of the contract. Of course. I've never denied that, have I? But in every true marriage there's something over and above the letter of the contract—to which the letter of the contract is as nothing. And if ever there was a true marriage, Edith, ours was."
"Stop!" Her little figure became erect. Her eyes, which up to the present he had been comparing to forget-me-nots, as he used to do, now shone like blue-fired winter stars. "Stop, Chip."