“I do, and I don’t. I believe that a man who exposes a woman to the possibility of having a child, ought to guarantee to support the woman for a time, and to support the child. That’s obvious enough—no one but a scoundrel would want to avoid it. But marriage means so much more than that! You bind yourself to stay together, whether love continues or whether it stops; you can’t part, except on some terms that other people set down. You have to make all sorts of promises you don’t intend to keep, and to go through forms you don’t believe in, and it seems to me a cowardly thing to do.”
“But what else can one do?” asked Corydon.
“It’s quite obvious what we could do. We don’t intend to be husband and wife; and so we could simply go away and go on with our work.”
“But think of our parents, Thyrsis!”
“Yes, I know—I’ve thought of them. But if every one thought of his parents, how would the world ever move?”
“But, dearest!” exclaimed Corydon, “if we didn’t marry, they’d simply go out of their senses!”
“I know. But then, they might threaten to go out of their senses if we did marry? And would that work also?”
“We must be sensible,” said the girl. “It means so much to them, and so little to us.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” he answered. “But all the same, I hate it; when you once begin conforming, you never know where you’ll stop.”
“We shall know,” declared the other. “Whatever we may have to do to get married, we shall both of us know that neither would ever dream of wishing to hold the other for a moment after love had ceased. And that is the essential thing, is it not?”