“No, no, Jim!” she gasped. “I've brought you enough trouble and enough disgrace. I won't let you ruin your life by marrying me out of pity.”
“Pity! Good God!” Jim groaned. “Why, you don't think I meant that, do you? I was just trying to be funny, because I was so happy. I'll promise never to try to be funny again. It was like saying to Venus, 'You're a homely old thing, but I'll let you cook for me'; or saying to—whoever it was was the Goddess of Wisdom, 'You don't know much, but'—Why, Charity Coe, you're Venus and Minerva and all the goddesses rolled into one.”
Charity shook her head.
He roared: “If it's pity you're talking about, isn't it about time you had a little for me? Life won't be worth a single continental damn to me if I don't get you.”
Charity had needed something of this sort for a long time. It sounded to her like a serenade by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Her acknowledgment was a tearful, smileful giggle-sob:
“Honestly?”
“Honest-to-God-ly!”
“All right, as soon as you're a free man fetch the parson, for I'm pretty tired of being a free woman.”
Jim had learned from McNiven that a part of his freedom, when he got it, would be a judicial denial of the right to surrender it for five years. He had learned that if he wanted to marry Charity he must persuade her over into New Jersey. It did not please Jim to have to follow the example of Zada and Cheever, and it hit him as a peculiar cruelty that he and Charity had to accept not only an unearned increment of scandal in the verdict of divorce, but also a marriage contrary to the laws of New York.
New York would respect the ceremonies of New Jersey, but there would be a shadow on the title. Still, such marriages were recognized by the public with little question, just as in the countries where divorce is almost or quite impossible society of all grades has always countenanced unions not too lightly entered into or continued. In such countries words like “mistress,” “concubine,” and “morganatic wife” take on a decided respectability with a touch of pathos rather than reproach.