“Explain your paradox,” said Hermia, who had made no comment to Quintard’s remarks.
“It is easily explained. I say nothing whatever of passing fancies, infatuations, passions, which are best disposed of in a temporary union. I refer to love alone. When a man loves a woman he wants her constant companionship, with no restraint but that exercised by his own judicious will and art. He wants to live with her, to travel with her, to be able to seek her at all hours, to follow his own will, unquestioned and untrammeled. This, outside of conventional bonds, is impossible without scandal, and no man who loves a woman will have her lightly spoken of if he can help it. But let the priest read his formula, and the man so bound is monarch of his own desires, and can snap his fingers at the world. I have neither patience nor respect for the man who must have the stimulus of uncertainty to feed his love. He is a poor, weak, unimaginative creature, who is dependent upon conditions for that which he should find in his own character.”
“I never expected to hear you talk like this, Mr. Quintard!” exclaimed Miss Starbruck, “for you have been a very immoral man.”
Quintard looked at her with an amused smile. “Why immoral, Miss Starbruck?”
“You have—well, people say——” stammered poor Miss Starbruck, and then broke down.
Mrs. Dykman came to the rescue. “Miss Starbruck means that you have lived with a number of women and have not taken any particular pains to hide the fact.”
“Is that immoral? I think not. I have lived with no woman who had anything to lose, and I have lived with no woman who was not my equal intellectually. Companionship was quite as much an object as passion. I never took a woman out of the streets and hung jewels upon her and adored her for her empty beauty, and with a certain class of women I have never exchanged a dozen words since my callow youth. Furthermore, I never won a woman’s affections from her husband. If I ever got them he had lost them first. Therefore, I protest against being called immoral.”
“If you want to go into the question of moral ethics,” said Cryder, “you cannot plead guiltless altogether of immorality. In openly living with a woman who is not your wife you outrage the conventions of the community and set it a bad example. It may be argued that you do less harm than those who pursue the sort of life you let alone; but the positive harm is there.”
All looked at Quintard, wondering how he would reply. Even Hermia felt that he was driven into a corner.
“The question is,” replied Quintard, slowly, “What is morality? The world has many standards, from that of the English Government to that of the African barbarian, who follows his instincts, yet who, curiously enough, is in all respects more of a villain than his artificial brother. That point, however, we will not discuss. A man’s standard, of course, is determined by the community in which he lives. We will consider him first in relation to himself. Man is given a temperament which varies chiefly according to his physical strength, and tastes which are distinctly individual. And he not only is a different man after the experiences of each successive decade, but he frequently waits long for the only woman for whom he is capable of feeling that peculiar and overwhelming quality of love which demands that he shall make her his wife. But in the mean time he cannot go altogether companionless, and he meets many women with whom life is by no means unennobling. As to the community, I deny that he sets it a bad example. It is a wiser, more educating, and more refined life than insensate love-making to every pretty weak woman who comes along, or than associations which degrade a man’s higher nature and give him not a grain of food for thought. If more men, until ready to marry, spent their lives in the manner which I have endeavored to defend, there would be less weariness of life, less drinking, less excess, less vice of all sorts.”