"Wait! I have faith that it will be!"
"If one flag should cover us—my flag—would you—would you—?"
"Ah, Vincent! don't ask me; don't force me to say something thing that will make you unhappy, since I don't know my own mind well enough yet to answer as you wish me to answer—"
"But you can tell me now whether you love me, or, at least, whether there is any one you love more?"
"I don't think I love you. I know, however, that I think no more of any one else than I think of you; pray, let that suffice."
"But how cruel that is, Olympia! It is as much, as to say that you won't wait and see whether you may meet some one that you can be surer of than you are of me?"
"I must distress you whatever I say, Vincent! Frankly, I don't think you can decide just now whether your heart is really engaged. I think you do not know me as a man should knows the woman he makes his wife. I am certain I do not know you. If you had been born and bred in the North, I should have no difficulty in deciding; but your ways are so different here: women are accorded so much before marriage, and made so little of a man's life after marriage, that I shrink from a promise which, if lightly or inconsiderately given, would bring the last misery a woman can confront."
"What, Olympia! you think Southern men do not hold marriage to be sacred?"
"I think that the Southern man has a good deal of the knight you spoke of in him, and, like the Frenchman, marries inconsiderately, and does penance in infidelity, at least to the form, if not the fact, of the relation."
"O Olympia! where do you get such repulsive ideas of us; who has been traducing us to you?"