"You mean divorce and marry again—openly!"
"What does the ceremony matter? I'm not sure we'd take the trouble of going through it," she shrugged her shoulders, "the Church says that it means nothing anyway; that it makes the sin no less."
"But, Georgia," he was beginning now to fear for her common sense, "for God's sake, if you do such a thing, first go through the civil form anyway."
She laughed triumphantly. She had caught him. "There spoke your heart. Of course, we'll have a legal marriage. You see the Church hasn't convinced you, either, that divorce and remarriage is the same as adultery."
She had crystallized her vague desires into positive determination by the daring sound of her own words.
XIII
REËNTER JIM
Al reflected moodily that arguing with a woman never gets you anything. If he had been trying to interest Georgia in a vacuum cleaner, he would have known better than to start in by arousing her to a fervor for brooms. Now he would have to wait a few days until she had cooled out, and then try her on a different tack, appealing to her affection and begging her not to bring disgrace upon the whole family.
She was half-sitting, half-kneeling on the window seat, her elbows on the sill, her cheeks in her hands, looking out into the dim urban night. Directly to the south, over the loop, where Chicago was wide awake and playing, the diffused electric radiance was brightest and highest—a man-made borealis.
She took pride in her big city. It was unafraid. It followed no rules but its own, and didn't always follow them. It owned the future in fee and pitied the past. It said, not "Ought I?" but "I will." It was modern, just as she was modern. She was more characteristically the offspring of her city than of her mother. For she was new, like Chicago; and her mother was old, like the Church.