“But isn’t it rather cowardly because you think you can’t have what you long for, to go and play at love—with such women as that?”
“It means nothing. No more than a good dinner or a beautiful picture or a play. Just passes the time.”
“It means more than that,” she said, speaking very earnestly and quickly, “ever so much more than that. It means that you are degrading love, by taking part of it and making it common and vile. That’s what it means, and you see it clearly enough when a woman does it. Don’t you?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“You do, you do,” she exclaimed, standing still and looking straight at him; but he dropped his eyes before hers, and ground his heel into the soft gravel, “you do! I don’t care what a man or a woman does for love. I’m not talking unthinking nonsense about the sanctity of marriage—there’s just one thing in the world, and everything done in its name is forgivable.”
“You mean——?”
“Love.”
He looked at her now.
“Love?” he said. “My God, there’s no man in the world worthy of you. Alice, I thought you were really in trouble yesterday, and I wanted to help you—is it that?”
“Is it—what?”