"Quite quietly," he pleaded. "No one would know but ourselves and the registrar and a witness whom we'd murder after the ceremony. Why shouldn't we? What are the reasons why not? There are only two; you ought to marry a certificated person and have an intelligent family; and I oughtn't to have a family at all. Well, you say you don't mean to marry anyone else; so you may as well marry me. So much for the first reason. And of course we wouldn't have a family; so much for the second. Well, then?"
"There's a third," said Kitty. "And the only important one. There's the look of the thing. I don't care how many people we murder, the secret will leak out. Things always do leak out. Never, in the course of twenty-nine years of endeavour, have I been able to keep anything shady from coming to light sooner or later. It isn't done. You ought to know that, as a government servant. Has any government ever succeeded in keeping its own dark doings secret for long? No; they come out like—like flowers pushing up towards daylight; and then there's the devil to pay. All our shadiest departmental transactions emerge one by one; nothing is hid that shall not be revealed. And our marriage would be the same. Be sure our sin would find us out. And that would be the end of your career, and probably of the Ministry as well; I believe the Ministry will stand or fall with you; and it's already pretty tottery.... It's a pity you can't get exemption; but of course your case is one in which it's absolutely never given.... No, we can't do this thing. You're the Minister of Brains first, and poor Nicky Chester, who would like to marry his girl, a long, long way behind. And the poor girl who would like to marry Nicky Chester—she's not got to count at all.... I don't want to be high-falutin and to talk about principles, only to have a little sense."
He was watching her moodily from under bent brows, leaning back against a beech-trunk and pulling up little handfuls of damp moss with his thin, unusual fingers.
"Sense," he repeated. "It is sense, to have what one wants, if it doesn't harm anything or anyone. And I'll tell you another thing—not having it is rotting me up altogether—me and my work. I didn't want to fall in love again; I hoped I'd done with all that; I tried not to take any notice of you. But it was no go, and I can't fall out again, and I'm dead sick of going on like this. And my experience of life, both private and public, has been longer than yours, and, as it happens, I've known of several transactions which haven't come to light and never will; I've perpetrated some myself in the Ministry, which even that clear light which beats upon a hotel hasn't yet exposed, and, heaven helping us, won't. You don't suppose all the dark secrets of the war ever came out? Of course they didn't. There are some that will wait till ... well, till the next war, let's say.... Kitty, let's try it. It's worth the risk, surely. Let's be sporting. We're missing—we're missing the best thing in the world, just out of funk. I thought you always did things, just for the sake of doing them. I thought you never turned your back on life. It isn't like you."
"Oh," murmured Kitty. "Life.... There's so much of that. This is just one thing out of it."
"While you want it," he returned, indubitably correct as to this, "it seems a long way the most important thing."
"It does," she agreed. "There's no comparison at all.... It's queer, isn't it, how strong it is, this odd, desperate wanting of one person out of all the world. It's an extraordinary, enormously strong thing.... But there are other things. There are jokes, and shops, and music, and plays, and pictures, and nice clothes, and Russian politics, and absurd people, and Greek poetry, and the world's failures caged together on one island, and things to eat and to drink, and our careers, and primroses in woods, and the censor.... Good gracious, it's all like an idiotic, glorified revue. We mustn't let the one thing, just because it matters most, matter alone. It's so commonplace. Our hearts aren't broken, and won't break. We're out to have a good time, and we'll let love and marriage go to the—anywhere they like, if we can't have them.... By the way, if it's any comfort to you (it is to me) I shouldn't make at all a good wife; I'm much nicer as a friend. I want too much out of life. I'm grasping and selfish. You'd find me tiring."
"I do," he returned. "You're tiring me to death now. I've plenty of friends already, thank you. And what does it matter to me what sort of a wife you'd make? You talk as if you were refusing a secretarial appointment. I want you, not a wife."
"You've got me," said Kitty, "only not as a wife.... If that's no use to you, we'll give it up. Nicky, I suppose we'd better give it up. It isn't working. I'll go right away. I'll get another job."
"No," he said gloomily. "There's no need for that. Why should you mess up your career? We needn't meet. We shouldn't naturally meet, unless we made opportunities. I think you're right, that we'd better not meet. What's the good of meeting, just to repeat this sort of scene again and again, and hurt each other? We've reached the breaking point; I can't bear any more.... I think we'd better leave it that you let me know when you change your mind and will marry me. You will, won't you, when you do?"