“Be a good boy! Don’t chase the cat or—Good-bye.”
“Suppose you were situated as they were,” said Mr. Wainbridge, “would you have sent him away? Would you have been afraid?”
“Afraid?” she repeated, with a contempt for fear. “No, I would have loved him—forever and ever. Why, because a man is bound to a vile woman, need he make the woman he loves vile because he loves her, or because he is bound?”
She looked at him, flushed with excitement, and doing battle for truth, and he realised that to some women love does not mean temptation because they are usually ignorant—at first. It would be difficult to explain this to Launa.
“I know not,” he whispered.
“I often wish,” she said, half to herself, “that we knew more of what will happen after death, if we were only told—should we try more? There is such temptation to become lethargic—to drown remembrance in the waters of Lethe.”
“You have no temptation. Do you want a reward? That is the lowest type of religion.”
“I do not want crowns, and vast seas of gold have no charm for me. Do you not suppose that Sylvia often wonders whether she will meet and know the man she loves again?”
“Certainly she does, and she will see him and know him here. He won’t be able to stay away.”
“You don’t believe in a future anywhere?”