“You have thought, haven’t you? Perhaps not altogether healthily, but keenly. Dinner-table conversations won’t be trite.”
“Thought! What has there been to do in Diversity but think? And the more I think, the more I comprehend, the worse the handcuffs cut into my wrists. Some day it will become unendurable.”
“And then,” Jim said, “I shall jump into the water after you. We’ll take altruism out of the dictionary for that one time, anyhow.”
She said nothing, moved toward the door.
“Our agreement is sealed?” he asked. “We are to act toward each other like ordinarily polite human beings while we are in the house?”
“Yes,” she said over her shoulder.
“Are we to shake hands on it?”
“No,” she said, sharply, and went out, carrying herself lightly, with splendid poise, eye-delighting grace.
Jim felt a tinge of regret that her face was not lovely. With the intellect that was hers, he thought gravely, with her beauty of line and motion, beauty of face would have made her a miracle. But she was no miracle. She was a small, over-burdened, vainly protesting girl who had fought her way alone to such ideals as she possessed. With her will she thought she had molded her own soul. She did not know that souls are never subject to finite processes; she did not know that each soul is a single drop from the great ocean of Divinity, coming to us in such purity as the great ocean possesses, to be made more pure or to be defiled by our acts—but never to be altered by our wills. One day would come when she would call up her soul before her and know it as she did not know it now.
Jim’s final thought on the matter was that Marie was not a modern woman, not an advanced woman, but a primitive woman, an atavism, fighting as her remotest mother must have fought for the very right to be.