"You ask terribly hard questions."
"You must have wanted to give it up."
"I did not want to. I was forced to."
"Who could force you?"
He saw what an effort it cost her to answer. The words were dragged from her. "I could not live with my husband and practise it."
"So much the more reason for quitting him, isn't it?"
"Oh, I want to. I want to be free. If I only could."
"Alice, you speak like one in despair. There is nothing to be so stirred about. You want to be free, I want you to be, you shall be. Don't get excited over the matter of a divorce. Your eyes are like saucers at the thought. Why?"
"Only because for me it is the final disgrace--not to be separated from him--but to marry again with him alive! It means the last step for me. And the public scandal! What will they say of me, who knew me at home?"
"Alice, this is the wildest supersensitiveness. The whole world lives in divorced marriages. Public scandal? No one will ever hear of your divorce. The courts that grant your plea will attend to suppressing everything."