“No. That is the reasonable understanding between man and wife. If I exact fidelity from you, and certainly I should, I must consider myself under the same obligation.”
“You say “man and wife.” Do you say it with the ordinary meaning?”
“Not as it applies to us. You know what I mean when I ask you to be my wife. If we cannot trust each other without legal bonds, any union between us would be unjustified.”
Suppressing the agitation which he felt, he awaited her answer. They could still read each other’s faces perfectly in a pale yellow light from across the sea. Rhoda’s manifested an intense conflict.
“After all, you doubt of your love for me?” said Barfoot quietly.
That was not her doubt. She loved with passion, allowing herself to indulge the luxurious emotion as never yet. She longed once more to feel his arms about her. But even thus she could consider the vast issues of the step to which she was urged. The temptation to yield was very strong, for it seemed to her an easier and a nobler thing to proclaim her emancipation from social statutes than to announce before her friends the simple news that she was about to marry. That announcement would excite something more than surprise. Mary Barfoot could not but smile with gentle irony; other women would laugh among themselves; the girls would feel a shock, as at the fall of one who had made heroic pretences. A sure way of averting this ridicule was by furnishing occasion for much graver astonishment. If it became known that she had taken a step such as few women would have dared to take—deliberately setting an example of new liberty—her position in the eyes of all who knew her remained one of proud independence. Rhoda’s character was specially exposed to the temptation of such a motive. For months this argument had been in her mind, again and again she decided that the sensational step was preferable to a commonplace renunciation of all she had so vehemently preached. And now that the moment of actual choice had come she felt able to dare everything—as far as the danger concerned herself; but she perceived more strongly than hitherto that not only her own future was involved. How would such practical heresy affect Everard’s position?
She uttered this thought.
“Are you willing, for the sake of this idea, to abandon all society but that of the very few people who would approve or tolerate what you have done?”
“I look upon the thing in this way. We are not called upon to declare our principles wherever we go. If we regard each other as married, why, we are married. I am no Quixote, hoping to convert the world. It is between you and me—our own sense of what is reasonable and dignified.”
“But you would not make it a mere deception?”