"I thought you meant that."
"The thing is," said Laura, "not to marry." She said it meditatively and without reference to herself; but he gathered that, if reference had been made, she would, with still more dogged a determination, have kept her view.
He agreed with her, and pondered. Tanqueray had once said the very same thing to him, in talking about Jane. She ought not to marry. He, Tanqueray, wasn't going to, not if he knew it. That was the view they all took. Not to marry.
He knew that they were under vows of poverty. Were they pledged to chastity and obedience, too? Obedience, immitigable, unrelenting? How wonderful they were, they and their achievements and renunciations, the things they did, and the things they let alone simply and as a matter of course, with their infallible instinct for the perfect. High, solitary priest and priestesses of a god diviner than desire. And She—he saw her more virgin, more perfect than they all.
"You think too then," the blameless youth continued, "that if Miss Holland—married it would injure her career?"
"Injure it? There wouldn't be any career left to injure."
Was it really so? He recorded, silently, his own determination to remember that. It had for him, also, the consecration of a vow.
A thought struck him. Perhaps Laura, perhaps Tanqueray, had divined him and were endeavouring in kindness to take from him the poison of a preposterous hope. He preferred, however, not to explain them or the situation or himself thus. He was, with all possible sublimity, renouncing Jane.
Another thought struck him. It struck him hard, with the shock almost of blasphemy. It broke into speech.
"Not," he said, "if she were to marry Him?"