“It’s quite true,” she said slowly, “that I love Dominick. I love him with the best I’ve got. It’s true that I would like to be his wife. It would be a wonderful happiness. But I can’t have it, and so there’s no good thinking about it, or trying to bring it about. It can’t be, and we—you too, papa—must give it up.”
He pressed himself back in his chair, looking at her with lowering, somber disapprobation—a look he had seldom had cause to level at his daughter.
“So you’re going to condemn this poor devil, who loves you and whom you say you love, to a future that’s going to kill any hope in him? You’re going to say to him, ‘You can be free, and make something of your life, and have the woman you want for your wife, but I forbid all that, and I’m going to send you back to prison.’ I can’t seem to believe that it’s my Rosey who’s saying that, and who’s so hard and inhuman.”
Rose turned from the fire. He noted an expression almost of austerity on her face that was as new to him as the revelation of obstinacy and indifference to his will she had shown to-night.
“Papa, you don’t understand what I feel. It’s not what you want, or what I want, or what Dominick wants. It’s not what’s going to please us and make us comfortable and happy. It’s something that’s much more important than that. I can’t make Dominick happy and let him make his life a success at the expense of that woman. I can’t take him out of prison, as you call it, because he’s got a responsibility in the prison, that he voluntarily took on himself, and that he’s got to stand by. A man can’t stay by his marriage only as long as it’s pleasant. He can’t throw down the woman he’s made his wife just because he finds he doesn’t like her. If she’s been disagreeable that’s a misfortune, but it doesn’t liberate him from the promises he’s made.”
“Then you think when a man like Dominick Ryan, hardly more than a boy, makes a mistake that ruins his life, he’s got to stay by it?”
“Yes, he must. He’s given a solemn promise. He must keep it. Mistake or sin doesn’t matter.”
The old man was silent. He had presented his case as strongly and persuasively as he knew how, and he had lost it. There was no longer any use in arguing with that unshakable feminine obstinacy, rooted, not in reason but in something rock-like, off which the arguments of reason harmlessly glanced. He had a dim, realizing sense that at the bottom of the woman’s illogical, whim-driven nature, there was that indestructible foundation of blind, governing instincts, and that in them lay her power.
“I guess that lets me out,” he said, turning to knock off the long ash on his cigar. “I guess there’s no use, Rosey, for you and me to try to come to an agreement on this matter.”
“No, there isn’t. And don’t let’s talk about it any more.” She turned from the fire and came toward him. “But you must promise me one thing—that that woman is to be let alone, that no one—you or any one you have any control over—makes any more offers of money to her.”