He looked at her, puzzled, vainly trying to understand her point of view. “But, Rhoda, I can’t see what difference that makes. If you love me and I love you—and heaven knows I do, dear heart—I can’t see why a matter of opinion should keep us apart. Look at your father and mother. He is violently opposed to slavery and she still believes in it, and yet they loved and were married and have lived happily together. Why can’t we do the same?”
“But this is different. Mother just gave up things she liked and the kind of life she enjoyed. I could do that—oh, I’d love to do that, for you—for any one I loved. But she didn’t have to become part of something that she thought was wrong. I can’t marry you, Jeff, because I know that slavery is wrong, wicked, horrible, and I simply couldn’t endure being part of it and having to uphold it.”
He rose and walked back and forth in front of her. “This is your father’s influence,” he said resentfully. “He told me that he would use it against me.”
“No, you must not blame father,” she responded quickly. “He has said very little to me about it, and he told me that it was something I must settle with my own conscience. And mother has said everything she could think of to persuade me. I’ve worked it out myself, and I know that I can’t marry you—but, oh, Jeff! I want to be your wife more than anything in the world!”
It was almost a glare with which he surveyed her as she uttered her last words. His hands, hanging at his sides, were clinched. “Rhoda, this is fanaticism gone mad!” he exclaimed.
She rose and stood before him. “You will have to call it whatever it seems to you. To me it is the command of my conscience, and I’ve got to obey it.”
“Did that—incident—this morning have anything to do with your decision?” he demanded.
“Something, perhaps—no, I am sure I should have seen things as I do now, anyway, after a little. That only made me see the truth more quickly and more clearly.”
“The truth?” he queried. “You mean—”
“I mean, it made me see that I could never regard slavery as anything but wrong and monstrous and criminal and that I could never, never make myself a party to it.”