“I doubt it. I suspect that before long they’ll come wheedling about in the hope that I’ll let up on them or be a little easier next time.”
“I’m sure I do not care what they do,” said Marian, drawing herself up. “All I care for is—you, and to see you do your duty at whatever cost or regardless of cost—” she was leaning over the back of his chair with her arms about his neck and her lips very near to his ear—“you are my love without fear and without reproach.”
“Listen, dear.” He took her hand and drew her arms more closely about his neck. “Suppose that the lines were drawn—as they may be any day. Suppose that we had to choose, with all these friends of yours, with our position, yes, even the place I have won in my profession, my place as editor—all that we now have on the one side; and on the other side a thankless, unprofitable, apparently useless standing up for the right. Wouldn’t you miss your friends?”
“All our friends? And who will be on the other side?”
“Almost no one that we know—that you would care to call upon or go about with or have here at the house. Nobody with any great amount of wealth or social position. Those other people who are in town when it is said ‘Nobody is in town now!’”
She did not answer.
“Where would you be?” he repeated.
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of that.” She came around and sat on his knee. “Where? Why, there’s only one ‘where’ in all this world for me—‘wheresoever thou goest.’”
And so the half-formed impulse to begin to straighten himself out with her was smothered by her.
Both were silent through dinner. She was thinking how honest, how fearless he was, how he loved her, how eagerly she would follow him, how blessed she was in the love of such a man. And he—he was regretting that his “pose” had carried him so far; he was wishing that he had not been so bitter in his attacks upon his and his wife’s friends, the coal conspirators. When he had definitely cast in his lot with “the shearers” why persist in making his hypocrisy more abominable by protesting more loudly than ever in behalf of “the sheep?” Above all, why had he let his habit of voluble denunciation lead him into this hypocrisy with the woman he loved?