Her eyes swam as she leaned to him. “Don’t you see it’s because I care—because I care so much? Oh, Ralph! Can’t you see how it would humiliate me? Try to feel it as a woman would! Don’t you see the misery of being made your wife in this way? If I’d known you as a girl—that would have been a real marriage! But now—this vulgar fraud upon society—and upon a society we despised and laughed at—this sneaking back into a position that we’ve voluntarily forfeited: don’t you see what a cheap compromise it is? We neither of us believe in the abstract ‘sacredness’ of marriage; we both know that no ceremony is needed to consecrate our love for each other; what object can we have in marrying, except the secret fear of each that the other may escape, or the secret longing to work our way back gradually—oh, very gradually—into the esteem of the people whose conventional morality we have always ridiculed and hated? And the very fact that, after a decent interval, these same people would come and dine with us—the women who talk about the indissolubility of marriage, and who would let me die in a gutter to-day because I am ‘leading a life of sin’—doesn’t that disgust you more than their turning their backs on us now? I can stand being cut by them, but I couldn’t stand their coming to call and asking what I meant to do about visiting that unfortunate Mrs. So-and-so!”
She paused, and Gannett maintained a perplexed silence.
“You judge things too theoretically,” he said at length, slowly. “Life is made up of compromises.”
“The life we ran away from—yes! If we had been willing to accept them”—she flushed—“we might have gone on meeting each other at Mrs. Tillotson’s dinners.”
He smiled slightly. “I didn’t know that we ran away to found a new system of ethics. I supposed it was because we loved each other.”
“Life is complex, of course; isn’t it the very recognition of that fact that separates us from the people who see it tout d’une pièce? If they are right—if marriage is sacred in itself and the individual must always be sacrificed to the family—then there can be no real marriage between us, since our—our being together is a protest against the sacrifice of the individual to the family.” She interrupted herself with a laugh. “You’ll say now that I’m giving you a lecture on sociology! Of course one acts as one can—as one must, perhaps—pulled by all sorts of invisible threads; but at least one needn’t pretend, for social advantages, to subscribe to a creed that ignores the complexity of human motives—that classifies people by arbitrary signs, and puts it in everybody’s reach to be on Mrs. Tillotson’s visiting-list. It may be necessary that the world should be ruled by conventions—but if we believed in them, why did we break through them? And if we don’t believe in them, is it honest to take advantage of the protection they afford?”
Gannett hesitated. “One may believe in them or not; but as long as they do rule the world it is only by taking advantage of their protection that one can find a modus vivendi.”
“Do outlaws need a modus vivendi?”
He looked at her hopelessly. Nothing is more perplexing to man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.
She thought she had scored a point and followed it up passionately. “You do understand, don’t you? You see how the very thought of the thing humiliates me! We are together to-day because we choose to be—don’t let us look any farther than that!” She caught his hands. “Promise me you’ll never speak of it again; promise me you’ll never think of it even,” she implored, with a tearful prodigality of italics.