“And you love Milly enough to make her your legal wife?” Nathan interrupted in hard voice to the steam-fitter.
“You betcha life I do! I’d——”
“Then take her!” snapped Nathan contemptuously. With lips closed tightly, he turned. The episode was at an end.
“Huh! You want to get rid o’ me, don’t you?—Same’s your father got rid o’ your mother! I might o’ known!”
“Shut up, Mil! Don’t be a fool!” ordered Plumb. He had a man’s brain and masculine grasp of proportion, sluggish, but equipped nevertheless with a certain amount of common sense. “You mean this, Nat?”
“Do I look as if I were jesting? Two wrongs never yet made a right. I wronged Milly when I took her from you. Every day since, I’ve wronged myself. I see now—as I should have seen from the case of my father and mother—that all the legal and religious promises in the world can’t affect raw nature. People mated will love, honor and cherish one another. People not mated may live in the same house, eat at the same table, sleep in the same bed for a thousand years. Every moment of those thousand years they’ll be prostitutes. I see it now. And any one who teaches or preaches differently is an ass. Get out!”
Plumb heard and agreed inwardly that Nat was a high-brow. “Must o’ swallowed a dictionary!” he explained afterward. But from the dangerous predicament he needed no second invitation to exit.
“But I gotta get my clothes!” cried Milly, “and all my things——!”
“All your ‘things’ will be sent to your mother’s house in the morning. Get out!”
“Then you mean for me to get a divorce?”