"It depends," I said, and, as I am always playing parts to myself, right on the spot I was a chaperon lady. "It depends on whether you love enough. Do you?"
"I do. For myself I am entirely sure. As to Katherine—Suppose she tells you what she thinks."
I turned toward her. "Do you, Miss Katherine? It takes—I guess it takes a lot of love to stand marriage. Do you think you have enough?"
In the moonlight her face changed like her opal ring when the cream becomes pink and the pink red.
"I think there is," she said. Then: "Oh, Mary Cary, why are you such a strange, strange child?" And she threw her arms around me and kissed me twenty times.
After a while, after we'd talked and talked, and they'd told me things and I'd told them things, I said I'd consent.
"But if the love ever gives out, I'm not going to stay with you," I said. "I'm never going to be fashionable and not care for love. A home without it is hell."
"Mercy, Mary!" Uncle Parke jumped. "Don't use such strong language. It isn't nice."
"But it's true. I read it in a book, and I've watched the Rices. When there's love enough you can stand anything. When there isn't, you can stand nothing. Living together every day you find out a lot you didn't know, and love can't keep still. It's got to grow or die."
Then I jumped up. "I always could talk a lot about things I didn't understand," I said. "But I consent." And I flew down the road and left them.