"Don't you see, dearest, that you are utterly deluding yourself?" The fervency of combat came with his words. "Don't you see that all that is finest and most vital in you, is that part that's in protest? Don't you see that you are just reacting in every crisis to the cramped puritanism you once denounced?"
"Puritanism!" she exclaimed, and the gentle manner of her speech stiffened suddenly into a timbre more militant.
"Call it what you like. Yes, I am a puritan woman, Stuart, and I thank God for the heritage—if I am always to have to fight these battles against passionate rebellion. I know puritanism now for what it is. I guess Christ might have been called a puritan, when Satan took him up on the high mountain and offered him the world." She paused only a moment, then swept on with the fervor of an ultimatum. "And since you choose to put it that way," she looked at him with eyes full of challenge, "I mean to stay the puritan woman. You've come with your southern fire and the voluptuous voice of your southern pleading, to unsettle me and make me surrender my code. You can't do it, Stuart. I love you, but I can still fight you! If that's the difference between us—the difference between puritan and cavalier—there's still a line that mustn't be crossed. To cross it means war. If you fire on Fort Sumpter, Fort Sumpter can still fire back."
"How am I firing on Fort Sumpter?" he asked and she quickly responded. "You're assailing my powers of endurance. You're trying to make me take the easy course of putting desire above duty. You're trying to make me forget the ideals of the men at Valley Forge—the things that your ancestors and mine fought for when they went to war to build a nation: before they fought each other to disrupt one—loyalty and steadfastness!"
"Conscience," he said with the momentary ghost of a smile, "you are speaking from your father's pulpit. That is all an excellent New England sermon—and about as logical."
"At least it's sincere," she retorted, "and I think sincerity is what I need most just now."
The kindled glow of the woman turned fighter gave an enhanced beauty to the face into which the Virginian looked.
"Now certainly," he declared, "I shall not go. You say I have fired on Fort Sumpter—very well, I'll fight it out. You accuse me of assaulting your duty, but I'm trying to rouse you to a bigger conception of duty. I see in this idea to which you are sacrificing yourself as distorted a sense of honor as the suttee's, who ascends her husband's funeral pyre and wraps herself in a blanket of fire. I see in it, too, the dishonor of a woman's giving her body to one man while her heart belongs to another. By your own confession you are part Eben Tollman's and part mine. He holds only a pallid and empty allegiance: I hold, and held first, your heart, a splendid, vital heart.... I can offer you life ... and you belong to me!"
"Then you mean—that I must fight you, too—as well as myself?"
"I mean that you must, if that's the only way you can find yourself. I've asked you to divorce him—and let me be your husband. You refuse, but I have the right to take back what has been stolen from me, and I mean to do it. From this moment on I am avowedly and openly your lover—with all that that means. You have challenged me to attack. I mean to attack."