"Annette," said he, "I confess that I can scarcely understand what you ask of me. You talk of our marriage as of a prison, and your one idea seems to be to escape from it. My house has no bars at the windows, and it is large enough for one to be comfortable in it. But one cannot live with all the doors wide open, and my house is made to be lived in. You talk to me about leaving it, about having your individual life, your personal relationships, your friends, and even, if I have rightly understood, of your privilege to leave the home at will, in search of Heaven knows what you fail to find there, until it happens to please you to come back again some day. . . . This can't be serious, Annette! You haven't thought about it! No man could grant his wife a position that would be so humiliating for him and so equivocal for her."
These reflections were not, perhaps, lacking in good sense. But there are times when perfectly dry good sense, with no intuition of the heart, is a kind of nonsense. Annette, somewhat ruffled, answered with a proud frigidity that masked her emotion:
"Roger, it is necessary to have faith in the woman one loves; when one marries her, one must not do her the wrong of believing that she would not have the same care as yourself for your honor. Do you think that such a woman as myself would lend herself to an equivocation in order to humiliate you? Any humiliation for you would be a humiliation for her as well. And the freer she were, the more bound she would feel to watch over that part of yourself which you had confided to her. You will have to esteem me more highly. Aren't you capable of having confidence in me?"
He felt the danger of alienating her by his doubts; and, telling himself that after all there was no need of attaching an exaggerated importance to these feminine ideas, and that there would be time later to correct them—(if she remembered them!)—he returned to his first idea, which was to take the whole thing as a joke. So he believed that he was doing very well, when he said gallantly:
"Perfect confidence, Annette! I believe in your fair eyes. Only swear to me that you will love me always, that you will love me alone! I ask nothing more of you!"
But the little Cordelia, who could not reconcile herself to this trifling fashion of avoiding the honest response on which her life depended, stiffened against this impossible pledge.
"No, Roger, I can't, I can't swear that. I love you very much. But I cannot promise something that does not depend upon myself. It would mean deceiving you; and I shall never deceive you. I promise you simply to hide nothing from you. And if the time comes when I love you no longer, or love another, you will be the first to know it,—even before that other. And you do the same! Oh, Roger! let us be honest!"
That was scarcely possible. Embarrassing truth was something to which the house of Brissot was not accustomed. When it knocked on the door, they hastened to send word:
"Everyone is out!"
Roger did not fail to do it. He cried: