“Clive!” she cried. “Clive! And you mean that in the face of that, he proposed to go on and marry?”
“Well, Sylvia, you see—” And the young man hesitated still longer. He was crimson with embarrassment, and suddenly he blurted out: “The truth is, the doctor told him to marry. That was the only way he’d ever get cured.”
Sylvia was almost speechless. “Oh! Oh!” she cried, “I can’t believe you!”
“That’s what the doctors tell you, Sylvia. You don’t understand—it’s just as I told you, a woman can’t understand. It’s a question of a man’s nature——”
“But Clive—what about the wife and her health? Has the wife no rights whatever?”
“The truth is, Sylvia, people don’t take this disease with such desperate seriousness. You understand, it isn’t the one that everybody knows is dangerous. It doesn’t do any real harm——”
“Look at Elaine! Don’t you call that real harm?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t happen often, and they say there are ways it can be prevented. Anyway, fellows just can’t help it! God knows we’d help it if we could.”
Sylvia thought for a moment, and then came back to the immediate question. “It’s evident what Roger could do in this case. He is young, and Celeste is still younger. They might wait a couple of years and Roger might take care of himself, and in time it might be properly arranged.”
But Clive did not seem too warm to the proposition, and Sylvia, who knew Roger Peyton, was not long in making out the reason. “You mean you don’t think he has character enough to keep straight for a year or two?”