"A reconciliation with your family," he suggested.
She sighed, and sat silent a little, lost in thought.
"I do not live with my family now," she answered at last. "They have all their own interests, their own loves, apart from mine; would a letter or two a year from them make up after all for the risk of misery I should be running—for the terrible, helpless, hopeless, incurable misery of an unhappily married woman, if I should become one?"
He rose and returned to his old position, leaning over the veranda, looking down to the sea.
"You are cold-blooded, I think, Evadne," he reiterated.
She said nothing, but rested her head on the back of her chair and smiled. She was not cold-blooded, and he knew it as well as she did. She was only a nineteenth century woman of the higher order with senses so refined that if her moral as well as her physical being were not satisfied in love, both would revolt. They were silent some time after that, and then he turned to her once more.
"Will you promise me that one thing, Evadne?" he asked. "Promise me that during my lifetime you will never mix yourself up—never take part publicly in any question of the day. It would be too deuced ridiculous for me, you know, to have my name appearing in the papers in connection with measures of reform, and all that sort of thing."
"I promise to spare you that kind of annoyance at all events," she answered without hesitation, making the promise, not because she was infirm of purpose, but because she was indefinite; she had no impulse at the time to do anything, and no notion that she would ever feel impelled to act in opposition to this wish of his.
"Thank you," he said, and there was another little pause, which he was again the first to break.
"You would have loved me, then, if I had lived a different life," he said.