I sang to him, simple emotional music: Orfeo's lament, the finale of Il Trovatore, the angel song from Chopin's Marche Funèbre.
There was the last of my poor little test which had proved in him a chivalry, a generosity, a moral valor, a physical courage, a sense of beauty, a native humor, which made me very humble. All I had foolishly imagined in poor Lionel, all that a woman hopes for in a man, was here beyond the accidents of rank or caste. How pitiful seemed the standards of value which rated Lionel a gentleman, and this man common! Jesse is something by nature which gentlemen try to imitate with their culture. Should I go back to imitations? I had outlived all that before I realized the glory of the great wilderness, before I met Jesse and loved him.
Could I promise to love, honor and obey? I loved him, I honored him, and as to obeying, of course that's the way they are managed.
I wonder why women make it so important that a man should propose? It needed no telling that Jesse and I were in love. It seemed only natural that we should marry, and any pretense of mourning for the late Mr. Trevor would have been distasteful.
My dear father was content with my first marriage, because—it seems so quaint—Mr. Trevor was a sound churchman. The old saint had indeed one misgiving, for Lionel was very high church, and if he reverted to Rome, the religious education of any children—my father has found peace in a land where there are no doctrinal worries. But for his daughter he would pray still, lest she be yoked with an unbeliever. For my father's sake I asked Jesse about his religious convictions.
"Wall," he explained, "my old mother was a Hard-Shell Baptist, and father was Prohibition, so if them two forms of ignorance came to be used around here, I'd be a sort of mongrel."
"Surely you don't think the churches mere forms of ignorance?"
"Ignorance," he took the word up thoughtfully. "It's a thing I practises, and am apt to recognize by the way it acks. It ain't so scarce in them churches as you'd think. Maybe, knowin' more than me, you can tell me about that Sermon on the Mount. Was it a Catholic Mount, or Baptist, or Episcopalian?"
"Surely a hill, or mountain."
"And Jesus took his people away from the smell of denominations—Scribes, Pharisees, and such, to some place outdoors?"