"I say no such thing. It was Endicott who said so. I say that my view of life is very much more exalted and my standards higher than—yours, for instance. If you could understand my plane, you would understand me; but you can't. The æsthetic habit of mind is beyond your percipience."
"Then we can leave it out. You may deceive yourself with big words, nobody else. What are you going to do? That is the question. The fact that my peace of mind and my salvation are bound up in my wife is unfortunate, because I neither wish you to consider me, nor do I desire to be under any further obligation. But Honor is my wife, and, as that relationship is understood by common men, it carries with it definite limitations. She loves you, and never attempts to hide it. Her primitive nature is big enough to find room in her heart for us both; but my still more primitive nature can't tolerate this attitude. I'm not big enough to share her with anybody else, not big enough to watch her happier than the day is long in your company."
"You think soberly and honestly that the world grows too small for the three of us?"
"Little Silver does."
"We might toss up which of us blows his brains out."
"Try to feel as serious as I do, Christopher Yeoland. Try to look at the future of this woman's life, since you have approached me upon it."
"I do so, and I see a life not necessarily unhappy. A woman heroic enough to love two men deserves double share of happiness; don't you think so?"
"I suppose you're in earnest, though God knows it is not easy to argue with such a babbler."
"No, I'm not flippant. It is you who have got the perspective of this thing all wrong. If you were a little older, you would see how absurd it is to try and turn pure comedy into drama. If you were only a better judge of character—can't you understand that I'm incapable of tragedy? There's nothing hurting you, or going to hurt you, but your own narrow nature. When we're all white-headed—the day after to-morrow, or so—when we are all grown into the sere and yellow—you will be the first to laugh, through toothless gums, at this, and say that I was right."
"Well, we won't argue, because there's no solid ground where we can meet as a foundation for any possible sort of understanding. You take such a view of life and its responsibilities as I should have supposed impossible for a reasonable being. We're different to the roots, and, materialist though I am, I recognise, a million times more deeply than you can, the demands of this existence and the need to justify it. Now listen, and then we will part: I tell you that in my judgment as her husband, my wife's ultimate happiness and content and mental health will be more nearly assured if you go out of her life than if you stop in it. I ask you to go out of it. I recognise all that this demand means, especially as coming from me to you. You'll gauge the depth of my convictions that I can bring myself to ask you so much—for her sake, not mine."