"You made me promise to."
"I didn't make you. We can't make our gods do what we want. We can only pray to them. What a curse it is that we weren't born under a different star, Sarah Jane. For me, I mean. If your fearless mind had only been taught otherwise—but that's vain to regret now."
"Always the same with you—trying to teach me things too hard for me, and mix up right and wrong."
"But I don't do anything of the sort. Right is a great deal to me. In this matter right and wrong are not the problem at all. I'm only mourning custom and convention—not the clash of right and wrong."
The sexual relation had never occupied this woman's mind apart from marriage. Now he made it do so, and very leisurely, very carefully, explained what he meant by "custom." His manner was light and bantering; none the less, he revealed to her his own deep interest in this discussion. He was a special pleader. He laughed at religious interference in this connection; told her that it was an outcome of yesterday; that foreign races shared wives and husbands; that where life was easy, many men had many wives; where life was hard, one woman might take several spouses.
"Marriage laws," he said, "have always been a matter of physical propriety and convenience. Temperature and latitude, the food supply, the possibilities of population, and the dearly bought wisdom of the community, have regulated it—not any false nonsense about right and wrong."
He told her nothing that was untrue; but everything he said was an indirect petition, and she knew it. She was not shocked at the facts he placed before her; indeed, they interested her; but she refused to let him influence her own opinion. She contrasted Hilary's information with the fierce and fiery ideas of her husband on the subject. Between the two her own mind, through forces of education, inclined to Daniel; yet she saw no great horror in a wider freedom.
"'Tis wonderful how opposite men's thoughts can be," she said. "You and my husband do look at life almost as differently as the people you be telling about. 'Tis all one to you, so long as folk do what's good to themselves, without hurting other folk; but to him—why, the very name of evil be evil's self! Yesternight he was talking to a tramp who took one of your turnips; and Daniel saw him. And he said that, according to Christ, to look over a hedge with hunger after a root was as bad as pulling and eating it."
"Doesn't it scorch you, living with such a narrow spirit?"
"'Twould scorch me to make him unhappy."