“I don’t believe that you will want me to,” she replied more gently, wondering at the man. “If I did return it would be a new beginning, a real marriage. I can’t tell about that. I must be free first.”
“It doesn’t seem to me you are much of a slave!”
“No?” she was minded to refer to the money that had been used to build their home, but refrained. Suddenly passion broke through her calm manner. “A woman isn’t a slave—there is no question of it—when husband and wife are bound together. It makes no difference,—the desert, the mechanical routine of living,—then. She can starve well enough. But when they begin to live and to think apart—when I saw you and judged you and condemned you, then all the real freedom was yours, and I was degraded.”
“You use big words like the women nowadays. When did we separate and what ‘degradation’ do you bear?”
“We separated when you took ill-gotten gains—no! I mean I saw that we had made a mistake then, we had never really married, and from that time I began to want—some other satisfaction, and to hate Chicago and all there is in it.”
Wilbur waited, disturbed and mystified.
“Yes,” she went on passionately, “and degraded too. It is degradation to live another one’s life, or to live with him and bear his children—unless they come as the natural fruit of common passion.”
“Oh! that’s it—you want your husband to be always honeymooning it?”
“Yes,” she answered exhausted. “Otherwise, like Eve, a woman discovers that she is naked, and is ashamed. But this is useless. The fact remains—we are divorced, and I must go and get my life. You may say all the bitter things you wish. But I am not one who accepts,” she ended, with a thought back on what Jennings had told her.
“So,” said Wilbur cynically, from his position of the partner to whom marriage was naturally more episodic than ultimate. “You believe a woman should experiment, should break her vows if she finds after three years of apparent happiness that she prefers to run about Europe and moon over pictures to sitting by her husband’s fireside. Does a vow mean nothing to you?”