“Look here, Nell.... I do so want to—to marry you. I’ve told you billions of times. Darling ...” he dropped to a whisper; “Darling, I could get a special licence; won’t you? now that——.” He meant to say “Now that I’m off to-morrow,” but bit back the words, holding to an unspoken pact among the young men who go into the fighting line, that the “last-day-of-all” leverage is not a fair one to use in the shift of a girl’s will.
“I can’t marry you, Tim. How could I ever look Gillian in the face again? After she’s been so brave and wonderful ... just to show us all the way ... it’s simply nothing to follow, after someone else has gone first!”
“But——” Timothy stopped, his light thick eyebrows were drawn to a puzzled frown. Then he started off again—“I don’t see what harm it does anyone, us being married?”
“Marriage—is—obsolete,” said Nell, with absolute dead certainty. “And we owe it to the future, Timothy.”
“Owe what?”
“Not to give in.”
Nell was resolved not to give in. And hers was a nature of such thick obstinacy as Timothy had not even begun to suspect. There was little of Deb’s pliability about young Nell. Impressionable she was, unexpectedly, as in the case of her unswerving, unquestioning devotion to Gillian Sherwood, but she could not be readily diverted this way and that, as could Deb. This way—but not that.
“If we gave in and got married in the old stupid fashion, then dozens of other twos might do it because we did.”
“Would that matter?” Timothy asked unhappily.
She flashed: “Oh, if you’d rather be just anybody instead of Pioneers——” Then reproachfully, “You pretended to agree last time we talked about it. You oughtn’t to pretend, Timothy, because it makes me sort of step on something which I’m quite sure is there but isn’t—like that funny, hateful feeling when you go up one stair too much in the dark—d’you know?”