'I do not mean that you should. I distinguish. I mean that you will, that is all. I am not considering the moral ground of the action, but the human source of it. Your marriage may be the cause of great difficulties and complications, but if you are persuaded that it is quite necessary to your life to marry that young lady, you will marry her. It is by no means an impossible thing to accomplish, nor even a very difficult one.'
'You do not tell me how far it is a matter of conscience to consider the consequences.'
'It is of no use to tell courageous men that sort of thing,' said the priest. 'They take the consequences, that is all. No man who ever wanted a thing with his whole heart ever stopped to consider how his getting it would affect other people, unless the point of honour was involved.'
'And there is no point of honour here, is there?' asked Orsino, as a man asks a question to which he knows the answer.
'You know what you have said to Donna Vittoria,' answered Ippolito. 'I do not.'
'I have asked her to marry me, and she has consented.' Orsino laughed a little drily. 'That is the way one puts it, I believe,' he added.
'Then I should say that unless she, of her own accord, releases you from your word, the point of honour lies in not withdrawing it,' replied the priest. 'If you did, it would mean that you were not willing to take the risks involved in keeping it, would it not?'
'Of course it would. I wish you could make our father see that.'
'People of the previous generation never see what happens in ours. They only infer what ought to happen if all their own prejudices had been canonical law for fifty years.'
'That is sedition,' laughed Orsino, whose spirits had risen suddenly.