"Are you sure? Cornelia says that every free union is a mine exploded beneath marriage. I think she's right."
"A mine! Better call it a squib, Janet. And all the trouble you invite will be like laying a long and elaborate fuse to ignite the squib."
"Oh, you have no ideals left!" she cried, revolted at this demolition of her romantic conceptions.
"I have a little common sense left," he answered. "We can't escape the customs or the institutions of our time, however much we may disbelieve in them. Flying in the face of a decadent institution does not destroy it. It only gives it a new lease of life by putting the props of public sympathy and traditional morality at the disposal of its defenders. Look at the case of George Eliot. Did her entirely justifiable free union help the cause of marriage reform? No. It actually turned her into a defender of the very institution she had set out to challenge."
"What a very wise young man; this wise young man must be," she said, parodying a line of Gilbert's.
"No side-tracking! Promise me you'll turn the matter over in your mind."
"In my mind? Yes. But what about my heart?" she said. And with dancing eyes she sang:
"'Oh, the heart is a free and a fetterless thing,
A wave of the ocean, a bird on the wing.'"
Her voice turned his blood to paradisaical currents.
"If you sing that again, I shall kiss you on the spot, in public or out of it," said the tormented young man.