"And you've shown me," he ventured, "within the last minute, that you—love me."
Her figure grew more erect against the background of exterior darkness. Even the hand that rested on the woodwork of the window became tense. Lambent fire in her eyes—the light that he used to call non-Aryan—took the place of the fugitive glance of the woodland animal; but she kept her composure.
"Well, what then?"
"Then you'd be committing a sacrilege against yourself—if you married any one else but me."
If her heart bounded at the words, she did nothing to betray it.
"You say that, because it seems so to you. I take another view of it. Love to me does not necessarily mean marriage, any more than marriage necessarily implies love. There have been happy marriages without love, and there can be honorable love that doesn't ask marriage as its object. If I married you now, I should seem to myself to be deserting a high impulse for a lower one."
"There's only one sort of impulse to love."
"Not to my love. I know what you mean—but my love has more than one prompting, and the highest is—or I hope it is—to try to do what's right."
"But this would not be right."
"I'm the only judge of that."