"How can I do otherwise?"
Owen sighed, and they walked on a few paces. The last leaves were dancing; the woods were cold and wet, the heavy branches of the fir-trees dripping with cold rain, and in the walks a litter of chestnut-leaves.
"Not a space of blue in the sky, only grey. It will be drearier still in Glasgow; you had better stay here," he said, as they walked round the little lake, watching the water-fowl moving in and out of the reeds, and they talked for some time of Riversdale, of the lake there, and the ducks which rose in great numbers and flew round and round the park, dropping one by one into the water. "You will never see Riversdale again, perhaps?"
"Perhaps not," she answered; and hearing her say it, his future life seemed to him as forlorn as the landscape.
"What will you do? What will become of you? What strange transformation has taken place in you?"
"If—But what is the use of going over it again?"
"If what?"
"What would you have me do? Marriage would only ruin you, Owen, make you very unhappy. Why do you want me to enter on a life which I feel isn't mine, and which could only end in disaster for both of us." He asked her why it would end in disaster, and she answered, "It is impossible to lay bare one's whole heart. When one changes one's ideas one changes one's friends."
"Because one's friends are only the embodiment of one's ideas. But I cannot admit that you would be unhappy as my wife."
"Everybody is unhappy when they are not doing what Nature intended them to do."