She lifted her hands from the box and laid them on the table that was between him and her. She looked over at him and said, quietly, in a voice that shook only a little: "I do not want to get married, Stuart."
He was filling his pipe and stopped abruptly, spilling the tobacco on the table. "What did you say?" he asked in the voice of one sure he must have heard wrong.
"I said," she repeated, "that I did not want to get married."
He stared at her, his face screwed up. Then it relaxed a little. "Oh, yes—yes, I know how you feel. It seems so absurd—after all this time—after all there has been. But we must attend to it, Ruth. It's right that we should—now that we can. God knows we wanted to bad enough—long ago. And it will make us feel better about going into a new place. We can face people better." He gathered up the tobacco he had spilled and put it in his pipe.
For a moment she did not speak. Then, "That wasn't what I meant, Stuart," she said, falteringly.
"Well, then, what in the world do you mean?" he asked impatiently.
She did not at once say what she meant. Her eyes held him, they were so strangely steady. "Just why would we be getting married, Stuart?" she asked simply.
At first he could only stare at her, appeared to be waiting for her to throw light on what she had asked. When she did not do that he moved impatiently, as if resentful of being quizzed this way. "Why—why, because we can now. Because it's the thing to do. Because it will be expected of us," he concluded, with gathering impatience for this unnecessary explanation.
A faint smile traced itself about Ruth's mouth. It made her face very sad as she said: "I do not seem to be anxious to marry for any of those reasons, Stuart."
"Ruth, what are you driving at?" he demanded, thoroughly vexed at the way she had bewildered him.