"Yes, I know what you're thinking. But it would break the routine, anyway; it wouldn't be that way I would lose my soul; perhaps that way I might save it."
"You're a strange girl, Jean."
"Yes? After all these years? I am so glad. As long as I am strange you will be interested in me. That's the trouble with you; you're not strange. I know all about you. And I wouldn't be your housekeeper for life for the sake of being your lover for a week."
"Jean!"
"Shocking, isn't it? But true. Don't you know that's what happens, nearly always? It must happen, unless there are new points of interest always arising. I have the misfortune to think, and so I see these things in advance, and try to shield you from them."
"The misfortune to think?"
"Of course. Otherwise I could accept the ox-routine and grind out my soul in the treadmill of three meals a day. I suppose that's what people call morality—ideal wife and mother, etc. I'd run away from it all."
I, too, punched the snow with my heel. "I never heard you talk like that, Jean," I said at length. "I didn't think you thought—along those lines. You wouldn't excuse people who run—who disregard their marriage vows?"
"The first of which is to love," she shot back. "When that fails, all fails. Why make a mockery of it?"
"But I would love you, always—always. You would be to me the only—the only possible girl in the world!"