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Gannett, for a moment, made no reply. At length he said, avoiding her eye as carefully as she avoided his: “It might be different now; I can’t tell, of course, till I try. A writer ought not be dependent on his milieu; it’s a mistake to humor oneself in that way; and I thought that just at first you might prefer to be—”

She faced him.”To be what?”

“Well—quiet. I mean—”

“What do you mean by ‘at first’?” she interruped.

He paused again.”I mean after we are married.”

She thrust up her chin and turned toward the window.”Thank you!” she tossed back at him.

“Lydia!” he exclaimed blankly; and she felt in every fiber of her averted person that he had made the inconceivable, the unpardonable mistake of anticipating her acquiescence.

The train rattled on and he groped for a third cigarette. Lydia remained silent.

“I haven’t offended you?” he ventured at length, in the tone of a man who feels his way.

She shook her head with a sigh.”I thought you understood,” she moaned. Their eyes met and she moved back to his side.

“Do you want to know how not to offend me? By taking it for granted, once for all, that you’ve said your say on the odious question and that I’ve said mine, and that we stand just where we did this morning before that—that hateful paper came to spoil everything between us!”

“To spoil everything between us? What on earth do you mean? Aren’t you glad to be free?”

“I was free before.”

“Not to marry me,” he suggested.

But I don’t want to marry you!” she cried.

She saw that he turned pale.”I’m obtuse, I suppose,” he said slowly.”I confess I don’t see what you’re driving at. Are you tired of the whole business? Or was I simply a—an excuse for getting away? Perhaps you didn’t care to travel alone? Was that it? And now you want to chuck me?” His voice had grown harsh.”You owe me a straight answer, you know; don’t be tenderhearted!”

Her eyes swam as she leaned to him.”Don’t you see it’s because I care—because I care so much? Oh, Ralph! Can’t you see how it would humiliate me? Try to feel it as a woman would! Don’t you see the misery of being made your wife in this way? If I’d known you as a girl—that would have been a real marriage! But now—this vulgar fraud upon society—and upon a society we despised and laughed at—this sneaking back into a position that we’ve voluntarily foreited: don’t you see what a cheap compromise it is? We neither of us believe in the abstract ‘sacredness’ of marriage; we both know that no ceremony is needed to consecrate our love for each other; what object can we have in marrying, except the secret fear of each that the other may escape, or the secret longing to work our way back gradually—oh, very gradually—into the esteem of the people whose conventional morality we have always ridiculed and hated? And the very fact that, after a decent interval, these same people would come and dine with us—the women who talk about the indissolubility of marriage, and who would let me die in a gutter today because I am ‘leading a life of sin’—doesn’t that disgust you more than their turning their backs on us now? I can stand being cut by them, but I couldn’t stand their coming to call and asking what I meant to do about visiting that unfortunate Mrs. So-and-so!”

She paused, and Gannett maintained a perplexed silence.

“You judge things too theoretically,” he said at length, slowly.”Life is made up of compromises.”

“The life we ran away from—yes! If we had been willing to accept them”—she flushed— “we might have gone on meeting each other at Mrs. Tillotson’s dinners.”

He smiled slightly.”I didn’t know that we ran away to found a new system of ethics. I supposed it was because we loved each other.”

“Life is complex, of course; isn’t it the very recognition of that fact that separates us from the people who see it tout d’une pièce? If they are right—if marriage is sacred in itself and the individual must always be sacrificed to the family—then there can be no real marriage between us, since our—our being together is a protest against the sacrifice of the individual to the family.” She interrupted herself with a laugh.”You’ll say now that I’m giving you a lecture on sociology! Of course one acts as one can—as one must, perhaps—pulled by all sorts of invisible threads; but at least one needn’t pretend, for social advantages, to subscribe to a creed that ignores the complexity of human motives—that classifies people by arbitrary signs, and puts it in everybody’s reach to be on Mrs. Tillotson’s visiting-list. It may be necessary that the world should be ruled by conventions—but if we believed in them, why did we break through them? And if we don’t believe in them, is it honest to take advantage of the protection they afford?”