“The road is very bright here and carriages are coming,” she answered, sitting up and releasing herself from him. And then they both laughed at their sensitiveness to conventions.
Marlowe was all for flinging their theories overboard in the mass and accepting the routine as it is marked out for the married. But Emily refused. She could not entertain the idea of becoming a dependent upon him, absorbed in his personality. “I wish to continue to love him,” she said to herself. “And also I’d be very foolish to bind him, though he wishes to be bound. The chances are, he’d grow weary long before I did. A man’s life is fuller than a woman’s, even than a working-woman’s. And he has more temptations to wander.”
“We will marry,” she said to him, “but we will not ‘settle down’.”
“I should hope not,” he answered, with energy, as before his eyes rose a vision of himself yawning in carpet-slippers with a perambulator in the front hall.
“We will compromise with conventionality,” she went on. “We will marry, but we won’t tell anybody. And I’ll take an apartment with Joan Gresham and will go on with my work. And— Dearest, I don’t wish to become an old story to you—at least not so long as we’re young. I don’t want you as my husband. I want you to be my lover. And I want to be always, every time we meet, new and interesting to you.”
“But—why, I’d be little more than a stranger.”
“Do you think so?” She put her arms about his neck and looked him full in the eyes. “You know it wouldn’t be so.”
He thought a moment. “I see what you mean,” he said. “I suppose it is familiarity that drives love out of marriage. Whatever you wish, Strange Lady—anything, everything. We can easily try your plan.”
“And if it fails, we can ‘settle down’ just like other people, where, if we ‘settled down’ first and failed at that, we’d have nothing left to try.”
“You are so—so different from any other woman that ever was,” he said. “No wonder I love you in the way that a man loves only once.”