"You'd be marrying me," Rod repossessed himself of her hand, of both hands, "not my family or my acquaintances. They don't count so much as you think. We could have a whale of a time together, Mary. You're the only girl I know that's real, honest-to-God girl. You always were. I wonder if you have the same queer sort of feeling about me that I have for you?"
"I expect I have," she owned. "I'm not a fool, or a liar, or inclined to be evasive, Rod. I don't care for you in a cool, quiet, calculating fashion. I'm not made that way, any more than you are. But, oh, Rod, I've had a lot of unpleasant wisdom forced on me since you went away four years ago. It won't do. It won't do!"
"Why not?" Rod demanded. "If we choose to say it will, who's to stop us? We're ourselves, and living our lives is our own affair."
"Living our lives isn't just a matter of doing whatever a passionate impulse may urge us to do," she answered slowly. "What do you suppose your family would do and say when you announced your intention of playing King Cophetua to the beggar maid?"
"Whatever they jolly well pleased," Rod growled his defiance. "Besides I'm no king, neither are you a beggar. You exaggerate. Surely you haven't so humble an opinion of yourself?"
"It isn't humility. Far from it," the girl flashed back. "I may dislike the station in life in which it has pleased God to place me. But don't ever think I'm humble or diffident about it, or myself, or my people. Oh, no, Mr. Roderick Sylvester Norquay. But I don't wear blinkers. I see a lot of things I used to be unconscious of. One of them is that men like you are regarded as one class of beings, and girls like me quite another. Isn't it so?"
Rod sat silent. He was clear-sighted enough to see what she meant. His people—and by his "people" he embraced the whole category of his class—would say quite frankly and emphatically that Mary Thorn "wouldn't do." She wasn't anybody. She had never been anywhere or met any one. In a courteous, matter-of-fact manner they would make an issue of that. They would never countenance and accept Mary Thorn without a tussle. He saw all that, but it did not seem to him vital or final. And he merely sat silent while he sought cogent reasons to show her why these harsh facts she mentioned did not matter so far as they two were concerned. Why should they be governed by exterior restraints, taboos, penalties, if they had a burning need of each other?
He tried to put that into words. But the devils of perversity had entered into Mary. He could not drive them out. He sat there holding her hands, persuading, reasoning, pleading. He had a conviction that emotionally some flame in her leaped to the passionate fire within himself, and that she resisted only by some intellectual force that was stronger than his own. He could master her heart but not her will.
"What do you want out of life that we can't get together better than if you go after it single-handed?" he demanded savagely, "Am I not man enough for you? Why drag in class and money and all that sort of thing. You know that doesn't count between us. We've got something—there's something in us—that pulls us together. It was there long ago when we were kids paddling around together. It's grown stronger, through four years of almost complete separation. The peculiar magic of that—whatever it is—begins to work as soon as we come together. We don't have to tell each other. We know. Don't we? Isn't it true?"
She nodded, lips parted, eyes bright, looking out over the channel as if she saw more there than the running tide.