“I do not in the least understand this manner of asking conundrums; if you are alluding to a fashionable custom of which I know nothing, say so frankly. That will not wound me, since I am the first to declare that I know nothing of it. What do you wish?”
She felt his irritation increase, and yet she could not decide to say what she wished.
“I have begun badly,” she said. “I should have told you at first that you will always find in me a wife who will respect your ideas and beliefs, who will never permit herself to judge you, and still less to seek to contend with them or to modify them. That you feel, do you not, is neither a part of my nature nor of my love?”
“Conclude!” he said impatiently.
“I think, then,” she said with timid hesitation, “that you will not say that I fail in respect to your ideas in asking that our marriage take place in church.”
“But that was my intention.”
“Truly!” she exclaimed. “O dearest! And I feared to offend you!”
“Why should you think it would offend me?” he asked, smiling.
“You consent to go to confession?”
Instantly the smile in his eyes and on his lips was replaced by a gleam of fury.