"Oughtn't it to be read 'weeks,' perhaps? Criticism is very accommodating about the seven days of Creation. Make it weeks." The conversation became irrelevant.
But after a good deal more talk of the same sort, an hour later, Challis said, "You're not a consistent Rector, do you know! You said when we began that you couldn't and wouldn't advise me. And you have substantially advised me to tell Judith to-morrow that we must leave the forelock of opportunity alone, and just take our chance of a permanent veto on matrimony, if that Bill goes through the Lords."
"Well!—yes! At least, it comes to the same thing. It has leaked out in conversation what I should have said to you if I had thought you would take my advice...."
"Which would have been...?"
"Which would have been, 'On no account take an irrevocable step under pressure.' Believe me, Challis, if you do this thing, and this Bill never becomes law at all, and then you live to repent of the knot you have tied indissolubly, the thought hereafter that you gave way to a needless panic will make remorse tenfold more bitter."
"Are not you, when you say that, allowing a disbelief in the Bill's passing to influence you?"
"I may be, a little. But not nearly so much as I am by a belief I must try to explain to you ... well!—it's none so easy. But I thought I had succeeded in explaining it to myself too." He paused a few seconds, then got clearer. "It's something like this. I can't conceive that any retrospective clause of the Act could declare valid a marriage the illegitimacy of which the parties themselves had acknowledged during the period of its legal invalidity. Do you see?... You would very likely word it more clearly than I can."
"No—that's as clear as daylight. But I am not prepared to acknowledge the illegitimacy of my marriage with Marianne."
"How can you act upon it, to the extent of marrying another woman, without acknowledging it?"
"If I were not under compulsion to acknowledge it, should I ever have thought of marrying the other woman? I plead coercion. Marianne dissolved our marriage. I had no hand in it."