“And do you think that Martha, feeling as she does, would continue the acquaintance of a woman who had cast off her brother with no stronger reason than that?”
“It was sufficient for me. There could not be a stronger reason for divorce than absence of love on either side.”
“The world does not agree with you,” she said.
“Yet I fancy Martha would. If it came to remarriage on either side, her verdict would perhaps be condemnation; but I think she would consider separation a higher thing than a loveless marriage.”
Somehow, there was a spirit in these words that touched her heart. Her voice, for the first time, was a little unsteady as she said:
“You do believe that, at least! You do feel that I could never think of another marriage!”
“I have always felt it. Indeed, I may say I have known it. I know that you see the inevitableness of all this as clearly as I do. I have often wished, for your sake, that I had never seen you, to put this blight upon your life.”
“And have not I also blighted yours? Do you suppose that I never think of that?”
“It need not trouble you, if you do. In my case there was a compensation, and a sufficient one. In your case there is none.”
She knew what he meant; that his love for her, and that happy month of marriage, had been enough to pay him for having afterward lost her; and she knew that he held the fact that she had never really loved him to have barred her from any compensation at all. Why did she so resent his assuming this? Had she not told him, in language of such emphatic decision that it rang even now in her ears, that she had found out that she had made a great mistake, and that she had never loved him? He had simply taken her at her word.