"But it was a marriage," Forbes urged, stoutly, and rose to escape.
"Yes, but after all, what is a marriage?" Persis demanded, like a Pilate asking, "What is truth?" She rose to her feet, but paused as ardor swept her headlong. "Do you think it possible for any woman to live her life out without a lover? She may cherish the memory of a dead man or a faithless man; or throw her affection away on a fool or a rake; she may keep it a secret almost from herself, but never, never, never believe that any woman can exist without some man to pay worship to."
Forbes could only attempt a weak sarcasm, "Is it impossible that a woman should love her husband?"
In a daze he fell back to his seat, forgetful that he left her standing; but she was too much engrossed with her great problem to heed this; she went on, earnestly:
"Any woman may love her husband for a little while; or in rare case for a lifetime, especially if he beats her or is a drunkard." Then her unwonted oratory on abstract subjects palled on her. She came back to the concrete instance with an abrupt, "But Harvey, Harvey, why should we be wasting time talking about love?" She bent over him, but he did not even look up at her. He shook his head helplessly.
"I wasn't bred in your world. I can't understand a thing you have said."
His aloofness of manner gave Persis a sense of loneliness, and she wailed to him as from afar, though she sank down close to him. "But can't you understand how fate has made a fool of me? I married for wealth and to cut a wide swath. Well, I have the wealth. I can cut the swath. But I've found that my ambition isn't enough, any more than your soldier ambitions were enough. Harvey, I'm lonely, terribly lonely. My heart is empty; it is like an old deserted house, and a ghost haunts it, and the ghost is—I don't have to tell you who the ghost is?"
"And you know," Forbes echoed, "what ghost haunts me."
Persis was melted by his kinship with her suffering. She leaned so close to him that her very perfume appealed to him as the perfume wherewith one flower calls to another in the noontime of desire. And she said: "Harvey, I'm going to tell you a terrible secret that I've hardly dared to tell myself: I—I crossed the ocean to find you!"
He was suffocated with longing for her, and horror of her. He gasped, "My God! on your honeymoon!"