“There is a great deal to say,” he said in that decisive suppressed voice that had never been more characteristic. “We have neither of us come to this without thinking what it means.”
“I know. And yet there seem so many other things to hold by—honour, decency, self-respect, justice (for what has my husband done that he should be my sacrifice?), perhaps even the fear of God.”
“You will find all these included in what I feel for you. Do you think I am offering you a little trivial passion—a thing of the senses, that will only last a day?”
“Does it make any difference when the effect on others is the same? Some one must suffer through my disloyalty—that is the real stumbling-block. Will any feeling of yours, however sacred to us both, alter the fact that I am another man’s wife?”
“Even that is not an impassable barrier. Such ties have been broken before.”
“You are asking me——”
“I am not asking you for anything you might not give if you were an unmarried woman—as yet. How am I to make you understand? If I had wanted you for my mistress I should have told you so long ago. At least you could only have given me my congé. I don’t understand beating about the bush, if that is all that one wants of a woman, because it can’t be much loss if she says no—there are a great many more who will say yes!”
She thought of her husband’s often assertion that “every woman in the island had had a try for Gregory’s Powder,” and winced to see that he had appreciated his own power of choice—if he had chosen. She almost hated her own sex for giving him some ground at least for the brutality of his speech, and herself for listening to him.
“With you,” he went on, with that same terrible finality of a statement that could not be questioned, “it is different. I should be depreciating my own property. Some day I mean to make you my wife”—he drew a breath, and added her name, as if to say it were a natural joy—“Leo!” he whispered, the familiar contraction of Leoline giving her a little thrill of pleasure, even while it seemed dreadful to her that she felt she had no right to flinch from his bold statement. She had not thought over the situation without facing such an issue, as he had seen was inevitable, and she was too honest and too strong herself to weakly cry out that she had not considered this, or made up her mind. She had counted the cost to Alaric Lewin and to herself; perhaps passion weighed down the scale in which she placed her own risk, but she knew that her decision had been tacitly in favour of such a step as Gregory prognosticated to her mind by speaking of her as his wife. There was just one terrible difference in their point of view that she could not realise; his words simply meant to her the horrible publicity and degradation of the Divorce Court—but in his mind was that olden letter of which his own seemed a reflex—
“Set Uriah in the forefront of the battle ... that he may die....”