“It isn’t sentimentality, at any rate.... And nobody can ever convince me that I’ve done wrong or that I’ve taken any harm from her.... Even if this should prove to be only an episode, it has been a beautiful episode with nothing but good in it.... But this mystery, this fairy element, has somehow kept the realities at a distance. I have simply gone along and lived.... Why, I have hardly thought of such a thing as marriage in connection with her. Possibly you won’t understand that, but I understand it perfectly.... To marry Andree would be to make her real, material. The mystery would be gone.”
“I think I understand.”
“But to marry her and take her to Detroit!... Suppose I should take her home and then this story should come out—and it would come out somehow. What then?... When I think of that smug, gossiping crowd in the church vestibule, and of their looking at her and pointing at her and whispering about her—it seems like a profanation. I couldn’t bear it.... And then—well, I’ve inherited some of it myself. I belong to that crowd. I’ve their ideas of marriage ... and the vestibule doesn’t marry a girl who—has lived with a man....”
“You’re afraid of them.”
“I am,” he said, and flushed.
“But if you loved her—really loved her—”
“I do,” he said, quickly, “but can’t one love without wanting to marry? That is a thing that puzzles me.”
“I don’t believe anybody can love and be willing under any circumstances to part with the person one loves.”
“I don’t know.... Isn’t it, possibly, better to love and to be a part of a beautiful, rather mysterious, glowing episode and to have it end while it is beautiful and mysterious?... Then something always remains—something dreamlike and lovely. To come down to actualities, to marry, to take this mystery into the land of grocers’ bills and house-cleaning and the every-day problems of marriage—why, it wouldn’t be the same thing at all.”
“I don’t think you believe that. You’re arguing with yourself and trying to salve your conscience.... You’re afraid to marry Andree and take her home—”