“Well, why do you put up with it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I hate always squabbling. It’s much easier to give way to her, and usually I don’t much mind.”
“You don’t much mind whether we’re married!” Michael exclaimed. “How can you let Sylvia persuade you against marriage? Darling girl, if you marry me you shall do just as you like. I simply want you to look beautiful. You’d be happy married to me—you really would.”
“Sylvia says marriage is appallingly dull, and my mother and father didn’t get on, and Doris doesn’t get on with the man she’s married to. In fact, everybody seems to hate it.”
“Do you hate me?” Michael demanded.
“No, I think you’re awfully sweet.”
“Well, why don’t you marry me? You’ll have plenty of money and nothing to bother about. I think you’d thoroughly enjoy being married.”
For an instant, as he argued with her, Michael wavered in his resolve. For an instant it seemed, after all, impossible to marry this girl. A chill came over him, but he shook it off, and he saw only her loveliness, the eyes sullen with thoughts of Sylvia, the lips pouting at the remembrance of a tyranny. And again as he watched her beauty, the bitter thought crossed his mind that it would be easier to possess her without marriage. Then he thought of her at seventeen. “Michael, why do you make me love you so?” Was that the last protest she ever made against the thralldom of passion? If it was, the blame must primarily be his, since he had not heeded her reproach.
“Lily,” he cried, catching her to him. “You’re coming away with me now.”
He kissed her a hundred times.