"I name an hour. It seems childish. I can explain it. But it is named, I cannot deny, because I am a rather childish person perhaps, and have it prescribed to me to delay my speaking for a certain length of time. I may tell you at once that Mr. Whitford is not to be persuaded by me, and the breaking of our engagement would not induce him to remain."
"Vernon used those words?"
"It was I."
"'The breaking of our engagement!' Come into the laboratory, my love."
"I shall not have time."
"Time shall stop rather than interfere with our conversation! 'The breaking . . .'! But it's a sort of sacrilege to speak of it."
"That I feel; yet it has to be spoken of"
"Sometimes? Why? I can't conceive the occasion. You know, to me, Clara, plighted faith, the affiancing of two lovers, is a piece of religion. I rank it as holy as marriage; nay, to me it is holier; I really cannot tell you how; I can only appeal to you in your bosom to understand me. We read of divorces with comparative indifference. They occur between couples who have rubbed off all romance."
She could have asked him in her fit of ironic iciness, on hearing him thus blindly challenge her to speak out, whether the romance might be his piece of religion.
He propitiated the more unwarlike sentiments in her by ejaculating, "Poor souls! let them go their several ways. Married people no longer lovers are in the category of the unnameable. But the hint of the breaking of an engagement—our engagement!—between us? Oh!"