“There will be no excuse for you to become a bad woman. You have too much brain and money—too many methods of distraction. You can travel and make any life you choose. The world is an interesting place; you don’t know the A B C of it.”
“You are cruel.”
“Yes,” he said. “More so than you realize just now.”
“I’m not doubting that you love me. If I did do you suppose I would argue with you? I’m not in a tender or sympathetic mood. There is too much to be said. I must talk it out now; we are not an ordinary pair of fools.” She paused a moment and looked straight at him. “We have a more imperative duty to ourselves than to traditions. You are in the new world now, almost in a new civilization. Smash such outworn ideals. They are nothing, nothing to human happiness.”
“Such traditions as honor and faith and pity for the weaker are in the bone and blood of the older civilization. If we tore them out there is not much we’ve got that’s worth anything that wouldn’t follow.”
“I would not care—not a straw. I should love you whether you were satisfied with yourself or not, and I could make you forget.”
“No; you could not.”
“Oh, you are way above me,” she said bitterly. “I don’t mean to say that I haven’t known plenty of honorable men, but they would find a way out of it—for me. You seem to be welded together so compactly that every characteristic is bound up with every other. Nothing is acquired, separate. Probably I’d never reach you, after all. Perhaps it is as well we don’t marry——”
“I wish you would not talk as if I were an infernal prig. Can’t you imagine what an ass a man feels when a woman rots to him like that? I am the most ordinary person you will probably ever know. If I were not we wouldn’t be where we are to-day. Now that I have made such a mess of things I can only see one way out of it, and I don’t feel a hero, I assure you.”
“Have you thought of yourself at all during the last three days?”