"But," said I, "now that you have experienced the disadvantages of plurality, shall you advise your daughters to follow your example?"
"No," said both promptly, "I shall not advise them one way or the other. They must make their own choice, just as I did."
"Choice, I am afraid, is hardly a choice though. Plurality, I fear, is too nearly a religious duty to leave much option with girls."
"Nonsense," said the elder of the two, "I was just as free to choose my husband as you were to choose your wife. I married for love."
"And do you really believe," broke in the other, "that any woman in the world would marry a man she did not like from a sense of religious duty!"
"Yes," said I, regardless of the fair speaker's scorn, "I thought plenty of women had done so. More than that, thousands have renounced marriage with men whom they loved and taken the veil, for Heaven's sake."
"Very true," was the reply, "a woman may renounce marriage and become a nun as a religious duty. But the same motive would never have persuaded that woman to marry against her inclinations. There is all the difference in the world between the two. Any woman will tell you that."
"Then you mean to say," I persisted, "that you and your friends consider that you are voluntary agents when you go into plurality? that you do so entirely of your own accord and of your own free choice?"
"Certainly I do," was the reply. "You may not believe us, of course, but that I cannot help. All I can say to you is, that if I had the last seven years of my life to live over again, I should do exactly what I did seven years ago."
"And what was that?" I asked.