Edith still looked bewildered. "I don't know what you're talking about, either of you. What is it? Why are we here? Am I one of the two women to be saved?"
"The suggestion is," Chip said, dryly, "that Mr. Lacon wouldn't oppose your divorcing him, while my—my present wife might divorce me; after which you and I could marry again. Isn't that it, sir?"
The older man nodded assent. "It's well to use plain English when we can."
Chip continued to measure the Wetterhorn with his eye. "Rather comic the whole thing would be, wouldn't it?"
"Possibly," Lacon replied, imperturbably. "But we've accepted the comic in the institution of marriage, we Americans. It's too late for us to attempt to take it without its possibilities of opera bouffe."
"But aren't there laws?" Edith asked.
Again Lacon's lips glimmered with the ghost of a smile. "Yes; but they're very complacent laws. They reduce marriage to the legal permission for two persons to live together as man and wife as long as mutually agreeable; but the license is easily rescinded—and renewed."
"But surely marriage is more than that," she protested.
Lacon's ghost of a smile persisted. "Haven't we proved that it isn't?—for us, at any rate. Hesitation to use our freedom in the future would only stultify our action in the past. If we go in for an institution with qualities of opera bouffe isn't it well to do it light-heartedly?—or as light-heartedly as we can."
Edith looked at him reproachfully. "Should you be doing it light-heartedly?"