“A compact of a spiritual marriage in a place where there is no marriage. Do you mean, Morris, that you wish this strange proceeding to destroy your physical and earthly engagement to myself?”
“No, no; nor did she wish it; she said so. But you must judge. I feel that I have done you a dreadful wrong, and I was determined that you should know the worst.”
“That was very good of you,” Mary said, reflectively, “for really there is no reason why you should have told me this peculiar story. Morris, you have been working pretty hard lately, have you not?”
“Yes,” he replied, absently, “I suppose I have.”
“Was this young lady what is called a mystic?”
“Perhaps. Danish people often are. At any rate, she saw things more clearly than most. I mean that the future was nearer to her mind; and in a sense, the past also.”
“Indeed. You must have found her a congenial companion. I suppose that you talked a good deal of these things?”
“Sometimes we did.”
“And discovered that your views were curiously alike? For when one mystic meets another mystic, and the other mystic has beautiful eyes and sings divinely, the spiritual marriage will follow almost as a matter of course. What else is to be expected? But I am glad that you were faithful to your principles, both of you, and clung fast to the ethereal side of things.”
Morris writhed beneath this satire, but finding no convenient answer to it, made none.