Time had arrived to take the subject in both hands, so I gripped it firmly.
"You must be thankful to gain one point at a time," I said, beginning with the lightest end of my argument. "A little while since you feared you were fated for the life of those around—household drudgery, with an occasional sulky drive in the afternoon; now that you have escaped that prospect you are haunted by worse possibilities. No doubt you hear some saddening and deplorable stories, for some of the laws relating to marriage are degrading, and the lot of the married woman in the working class where she is wife, mother, cook, laundress, needlewoman, charwoman, and often many other things combined, is the most heartbreakingly cruel and tortured slavery; but you are escaping the probability of such a purgatorial existence. Take comfort in knowing that a great percentage of men are infinitely superior to the laws under which they live, because law is determined by public opinion, and though it restrains and modifies public behaviour it will not mould private character. Law is shaped for the masses, but there is a small percentage of individuals in either sex who are superior to any workable law, and I think Ernest Breslaw is one of these."
"Do you?" she said, sitting up eagerly. "Would you marry him without any fear if you were me?"
"I would—right at once. In spite of all its shortcomings I have a profound belief that not woman, as the poet has it, but all humanity—
'Holds something sacred, something undefiled,
Some quenchless gleam of the celestial light.'"
The rain that was temporarily washing the perfume from the flowers pattered against the window-panes and accentuated the silence, till I added—
"I will tell you my history some day, so that you may see that when I have belief in my fellows how little reason you have to fear. I have been an actress, you know."
"Yes; Ernest told me."
"Well, I'll tell you about it one day." I did not mention that I had expressly requested Ernest to keep my past a secret. However, I was not displeased that he had been unable to do so. If a man of his inexperience, and in the zenith of his first overwhelming passion, had been able to keep such a secret in the teeth of his love's wheedling, he would have proved himself of the stuff to make an ambassadorial diplomat, but not of the calibre to be the affectionate, domesticated husband, having no interests of which his wife might not be cognisant—the only character to whom I could without misgiving entrust the hot-headed Dawn.