Woman-like, she saw that she was beginning to get the advantage.
“Go over it all, dear. In the first place, it’s entirely for my sake, and not in the least for yours. So you can’t say there’s anything selfish in it, if you do it for me, can you? You don’t want to do it, you don’t like it, and if you do it you’ll be making a sacrifice to please me.”
“In marrying you!” Ralston laughed a little and then became very grave again.
“Yes, in marrying me. It’s a mere formality, and nothing else. We’re not going to run away afterwards, nor meet in the dark in Gramercy Park nor do anything in the least different from what we’ve always done, until I’ve got what I want from uncle Robert. Then we’ll acknowledge the whole thing, and I’ll take all the blame on myself, if there is any—”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” interrupted Ralston.
“Unless you tell a story that’s not true, you won’t be able to find anything to blame yourself with,” answered Katharine. “So it will be all over, and it will save no end of bother—and expense. Which is something, as neither of us, nor our people, have any money to speak of, and a wedding costs ever so much. I needn’t even have a trousseau—just a few things, of course—and poor papa will be glad of that. You needn’t laugh. You’ll be doing him a service, as well as me. And you see how I can put it to uncle Robert, don’t you? ‘Uncle Robert, we’re married—that’s all. What are you going to do about it?’ Nothing could be plainer than that, could it?”
“Nothing!”
“Now he will simply have to do something. Perhaps he’ll be angry at first, but that won’t last long. He’ll get over it and laugh at my audacity. But that isn’t the main point. It’s perfectly conceivable that you might work and slave at something you hate for years and years, until we could get married in the regular way. The principal question is the other—my freedom afterwards to do exactly as I please about my religion without any possibility of any one interfering with our marriage.”
“Katharine! Do you really mean to say that if you were a Catholic, and if the priests said that we shouldn’t be married, you would submit?”
“If I couldn’t, I couldn’t,” Katharine answered. “If I were a Catholic, and a good Catholic,—I wouldn’t be a bad one,—no marriage but a Catholic one would be a marriage at all for me. And if they refused it, what could I do? Go back? That would be lying to myself. To marry you in some half regular way—”