Kroll. Quite so. Well, well, let us be content with your explanation, for the present. But you see that is another point on which you have cherished a certain prejudice.
Rebecca. Yes, that is quite true.
Kroll. And it seems to me that very much the same applies to most of this "emancipation" of yours, as you call it. Your reading has introduced you to a hotch-potch of new ideas and opinions; you have made a certain acquaintance with researches that are going on in various directions—researches that seem to you to upset a good many ideas that people have hitherto considered incontrovertible and unassailable. But all this has never gone any further than knowledge in your case, Miss West—a mere matter of the intellect. It has not got into your blood.
Rebecca (thoughtfully). Perhaps you are right.
Kroll. Yes, only test yourself, and you will see! And if it is true in your case, it is easy to recognise how true it must be in John Rosmer's. Of course it is madness, pure and simple. He will be running headlong to his ruin if he persists in coming openly forward and proclaiming himself an apostate! Just think of it—he, with his shy disposition! Think of HIM disowned—hounded out of the circle to which he has always belonged—exposed to the uncompromising attacks of all the best people in the place. Nothing would ever make him the man to endure that.
Rebecca. He MUST endure it! It is too late now for him to draw back.
Kroll. Not a bit too late—not by any means too late. What has happened can be hushed up—or at any rate can be explained away as a purely temporary, though regrettable, aberration. But—there is one step that it is absolutely essential he should take.
Rebecca. And that is?
Kroll. You must get him to legalise his position, Miss West.
Rebecca. The position in which he stands to me?