dragged through the public mire does not disconcert you?"
"No."
"Why not? Is it because your clairvoyance reassures you as to the outcome of all this?"
"Dear," she said, gently, "I know no more of the outcome than you do. I know nothing more concerning our future than do you—excepting, only, that we shall journey toward it together, and through it to the end, accomplishing the destiny which links us each to the other.... I know no more than that."
"Then why are you so serene under the menace of this miserable affair? For myself I care nothing; I'd thank God for a divorce on any terms. But you—dearest—dearest!—I cannot endure the thought of you entangled in such a shameful—"
"Where is the shame, Clive? The real shame, I mean. In me there are two selves; neither have, as yet, been disgraced by any disobedience of any law framed by men for women. Nor shall I break men's laws—under which women are governed without their own consent—unless no other road to our common destiny presents itself for me to follow." ... She smiled, watching his intent and sombre face:
"Don't fear for me, dear. I have come to understand what life is, and I mean to live it, wholesomely, gloriously, uncrippled in body and mind, unmaimed by folk-ways and by laws as ephemeral—" she turned toward the open windows—"as those frail-winged things that float in the sunshine above Spring Pond, yonder, born at sunrise, and at sundown dead."
She laughed, leaning there on her dimpled elbows, stripping a peach of its velvet skin:
"The judges of the earth,—and the power of them!—What is it, dear, compared to the authority of love! To-day men have their human will of men, judging, condemning, imprisoning, slaying, as the moral fashion of the hour dictates. To-morrow folk-ways change; judge and victim vanish along with fashions obsolete—both alike, their brief reign ended.