"I suppose not. He's too poor, for one thing. He isn't going to ask me, for another."
"One would imagine you wanted him to," said Cornelia, with concise sarcasm.
"We got along splendidly as partners."
"Partners! What has that to do with marriage?"
"What has anything to do with marriage? I understood your reasons when you believed that marriage was a prison. I confess I don't understand your reasons now that you believe marriage to be a haven of bliss. Mind, I don't say it is a prison, and I don't say that it isn't a haven of bliss."
Janet tried to check her sub-ironical impulses: they were irrepressible.
"I feel too much in the dark about the whole thing," she went on, "to be as cocksure as I used to be. But if one isn't to marry a man because one has found him to be a splendid companion in the wear and tear of working together, why is one to marry him?"
"How you do run on, Araminta! Prisons and hells, Paradises and havens of bliss—you jump from one extreme to the other. Who mentioned these things? My dear, one marries a man because he calls to what is deepest and truest in one. Because he responds to—"
"The mating instinct?"
"How can you sit there and say such vulgar things?"