"Don't, dear. We are out. To me, we seem the great exception to every rule on earth."
"But earth isn't the end of everything," Ferlie gasped, "and you'll see that too, some day; even if I were to take advantage of your blindness now. Is there not one corner in all this wide world where you and I can hide ourselves with John and Thu Daw and live out our friendship in peace?"
"Dear, you've given me the key and I have turned the lock. The bolt is on the inside. I yielded up some none-too-solid convictions to your mysticism; cannot you, in return, yield a little of your mysticism to my common sense? We are in the twentieth century: it is a day of elastic ideas for all who have imbibed the plain truth that to live in peace we must let our neighbours live in peace. The minimum observance of Herd Law, and Civilization is satisfied. As a woman who has divorced her husband—in the last divorce bill we can find cause for that without touching upon more personal reasons—you'd be remarried to a man who had had a son by a dead Burmese girl. The position would, at least, be comprehensible, even to the narrow-minded. Why are we torturing ourselves with the precepts of a dead Jewish Teacher, whose dead words are only kept in evidence by those to whose interest it is to exploit them?"
He spoke with quick diffidence, pricked by the thought that he was literally attacking her God.
The circumstances in which they were living might meet with the censure of the Church's accumulated wisdom and understanding of human nature, but he would have had her oppose directly the inflexible word of One who taught all lovers that His Name is Love.
She pulled herself together and stood up, spreading wide her arms as if to embrace the light which eluded her.
"This much I will yield, Cyprian. Let me try and find some quiet place where we can be alone and think. I am glad we have been forced to sever all artificial connection with our fellow-men. Bless Aunt B.! We have enough money to go where we please, and when I have chosen a refuge where we can be, figuratively, apart in the desert, when we have had time to forget the harsh inharmonies of the past weeks; when there is no need any longer for us to live under the shadow of a lie, then I will promise you to approach the whole question with an open mind; to make sure that my sense of values is rightly adjusted. And there we can decide, at rest in one another's trust, which of us two in these visionary matters, as you describe them, is finally to follow and which to lead."
Before he could answer John walked into the room; the broad-brimmed cow-boy hat which he usually wore for shade, pressed flat against the back of his head like a plate. The Burman boy, who accompanied him daily on his afternoon jaunts, silently disappeared as he caught sight of the master and mistress.
"How funny you look, John," said Ferlie. "Pull your hat on properly if you are going out."
But John demurred.