"Why? Don't you believe any marriage can be happy?"
"Elena, have you ever heard of a honeymoon that lasts? Do you know how long any two people can endure each other without merciful assistance from a third? Don't you know that, sooner or later, any two people ever born are certain to talk each other out—pump each other dry—love each other to satiation—and ultimately recoil, each into the mysterious seclusion of its own individuality, from whence it emerged temporarily in order that the human race might not perish from the earth!"
"What miserable lesson have you learned to teach you such a creed?" she asked. "I tell you the world is full of happy marriages—full of honoured husbands and beloved wives, and children worshipped and adored——"
"Children, yes, they come the nearest to making the conventional contract endurable. I wish to God you had some!"
"Jim!"
He said, almost savagely: "If you can, and don't, you'll make a hell for yourself with any man, sooner or later—mark my words! And it isn't worth while to enact the hypocrisy of marriage with nothing more than legal license in view! Why bother with priest or clergyman? That contract won't last. And it's less trouble not to make one at all than to go West and break one."
"Do you know you are talking very horridly to me?" she said.
"Yes—I suppose I am. I've got to be going now, anyway——"
As he spoke, the glittering house became dark; the curtain opened upon a dim scene of shadowy splendour, into which, exquisite and bewitchingly immortal as any goddess in the heavenly galaxy, glided Farrar, in the shimmering panoply of Ariane.