THE LAST DISCUSSION.
The time of their departure was at hand. There had been two days of intense packing of the food and clothing necessary for their two-hundred-mile walk. Now that was behind them, and after a short trip which Philip must take the following morning, they would be off for the ten or fifteen miles they hoped to cover that day.
When night came they were overjubilant, and they sat before the cabin watching the lake as it shimmered in the moonlight. Claire was pensively silent, though her heart sang. She was dreaming out her days, painting them on the moonlit water, and she paid very little heed to the two men, though unconsciously her whole personality leaned toward Lawrence. What they were saying she did not at first know, but gradually her attention was caught and she listened earnestly with an ever-growing fear in her heart.
She saw the deep fire that burned in Philip's eyes, and she realized that Lawrence was unaware of how his provocative, half-humorous ironies were stirring the volcano within the man who sat beside him.
"No man has a right," Philip was saying, "to think of a woman in his house unless he can think of her as altogether trustworthy, pure, and beyond temptation. If he does think of her differently, he is a beast, and wants a mistress, not a wife."
Lawrence laughed carelessly. "The average man wants both in one," he said. "Personally, so far as your talk about suspicion goes, who needs to think either way? I'm sure I don't. I'm quite content to live with a woman, giving and taking what we can enjoy together, and not asking that she limit her time and devotion to me. She may have various outside interests of her own. In fact, I would prefer that life should hold a separate work for her."
"Oh, you do not care. You are too selfish to feel any responsibility for a woman's soul. I would feel depraved if I did not guard my wife's soul by my very faith in her."
"Why should you guard her soul? Isn't the average woman intelligent enough to look out for herself? What she does, she does because she wants to, and for Heaven's sake, man, let her have the right to freedom of being."
"But real freedom of being lies in her dependence on me as the head of the house," Philip protested.
"If you happen to be the head of the house," Lawrence added jestingly.