"I shall not turn my back on it. Oh, Clive, there are so many more important things than what people may say about us!"
"You can't defy the world!"
"I'm not going to, darling. But I may possibly shock a few of the more orthodox parasites that infest it."
"No girl can maintain that attitude."
"A girl can try.... And, if law and malice force
me to become your mistress, malice and law may answer for it; not I!"
"I shall have to answer for it."
"Dearest," she said with smiling tenderness, "you are still very, very orthodox in your faith in folk-ways. That need not cause me any concern, however. But, Clive, of the two pictures which seems reasonable—your wife who is no wife; your mistress who is more and is considered less?
"Don't think that I am speaking lightly of wifehood.... I desire it as I desire motherhood. I was made for both. If the world will let me I shall be both wife and mother. But if the world interferes to stultify me, then, nevertheless I shall still be both, and the law can keep the title it refuses me. I deny the right of man to cripple, mar, render sterile my youth and womanhood. I deny the right of the world to forbid me love, and its expression, as long as I harm no one by loving. Clive, it would take a diviner law than man's notions of divinity, to kill in me the right to live and love and bring the living into life. And if I am forbidden to do it in the name of the law, then I dare do it in the name of One who never turned his back on little children—"
She ceased abruptly; and he saw her eyes suddenly blinded by tears: