“Not as I see it. The name a man gives to his wife ought not to have even a shadow of disgrace upon it. Don’t you believe that?”
“Y-yes, I suppose I do,” was the half-hesitant reply. “Yet that seems frightfully sweeping, when you come to think of it. It seems to shut out all idea of repentance and forgiveness.”
“Take it home,” said Philip shortly. “Would you marry a man who had a bad record, or whose father had been accused of a crime and was still lying under that accusation?”
She was still staring down at the dark sands in the creek channel.
“Since the beginning of time both men and women have been forgiving worse things.”
Never before in their renewed acquaintance had he felt so strongly the difference that a year’s burden of heavy responsibilities courageously taken up and carried had made in the dark-eyed young woman standing beside him. It was only at rare intervals that a flash of the old-time, teasing mockery came to the surface. He told himself that her burden had not only sobered her; it had brought her too crudely in contact with a world of compromises—ethical compromises. He remembered what Bromley had said about the double standard of morals, and the part good women played in maintaining or condoning it, and the recollection brought a bitter taste in his mouth.
“If women like you take that attitude, what is the use of a man’s trying to keep his record clean?” he demanded.
“Dear me! How savagely righteous you can be!” she exclaimed with a little laugh. Then she cleared the air with a plain-spoken declaration that served to increase the aloes taste in his mouth: “I suppose I am like other women. When the time comes—if it ever does come—that I think enough of a man to marry him, I shan’t ask what he has been; only what he is and means to be.”
“That is heroic—but entirely wrong,” he decided magisterially. “My code is stricter than that, and it applies to men and women alike. I mean to be able to give as much as I ask. If I can’t give, I shan’t ask.”
“What terrible spiritual pride!” she commented, laughing again. Then, soberly: “Don’t you know, I shall be truly sorry for the woman you marry.”