“Now listen, honey,” said he persuasively, “that’s all very well. I’ve got no right to interfere, and neither, we’ll admit, has anybody. But sometimes you have to push away these little rights and polite customs. They’re very nice for every-day use, but they’re not for big occasions. I suppose the Good Samaritan didn’t really have any right to stop and bind up the wounds of the man he found by the wayside. But I guess the feller he bound up was almighty glad that the Samaritan didn’t have such a respect for etiquette and wait till he’d found somebody to introduce them.”
“Oh, papa, that was different. Don’t confuse me and make me seem a fool. I can’t talk like you. I can’t express it all clearly and shortly. I only know it’s wrong; it’s a sin. I wouldn’t marry Dominick Ryan if he was divorced that way if it killed me to give him up.”
“So if the woman voluntarily took the money and went away and got Dominick to grant her the divorce, Dominick being, as we know, a man of good record and spotless honor, you’d refuse to marry him?”
“I would, certainly I would. It would be perfectly impossible for me to marry him under those circumstances. I should consider I was committing a sin, a particularly horrible and unforgivable sin.”
“See here now, Rosey, just listen to me for a minute. Do you know what Dominick Ryan’s marriage is? I don’t suppose you do. But you do know that he married his mistress, a woman who lived with him eight months before he made her his wife. She wasn’t an innocent young girl by any means. She knew all right where she was going. She established that relation with him with the intention of marrying him. She’s a darned smart woman, and a darned unscrupulous one. That’s not the kind of woman a man feels any particular respect for, or that a girl like you’d give a lot of sympathy to, is it?”
“I don’t see that that would make any difference,” she said. “I’m not thinking of her character, I’m thinking of her rights.”
“And don’t her character and her rights sort of dovetail into each other?”
“No, I don’t see that they do. The law’s above the character or the person. It’s the law, without any question of the man or the woman.”
“Oh Rosey, dear, you’re talking like a book, not like a girl who’s got to live in a world with ordinary people in modern times. This woman, that you’re arguing about as if she was the mother of the Gracchi, hasn’t got any more morality or principle than you could put on the point of a pin.”
“She’s been quite good and proper since her marriage.”