"You've got the best bargain in the world," she exclaimed. "You want
a man's love--you've got it--haven't you? And yet you're free--as
free as air. If you should tire--"
Sally laughed bitterly.
"Very well, then, if he should tire, you're your own mistress. All
this caging of wild birds seems to me to be futile. Morals? Oh, morals
be hanged! Are you going to call yourself immoral because the man
has no great respect for matrimony?"
"Yes; but I have."
"You have! That's only because you were dragged up in a rectory, just
outside the church door. I can't understand you. You've shaken off
your belief in lots of things--you don't believe in the actual
divinity of Christ--yet you cling to an antiquated sacrament that
dates back long before the time of a man whose statement that he was
the actual Son of God you're prepared to doubt. It's only because
you labour under the misapprehension--as nearly everybody
does--that marriage is a convenience to a woman. It's the
inconvenience of the thing that makes the morality or the immorality
in your mind. You're only a conventionalist like everybody
else-you're not a moralist."
Yet, notwithstanding all these arguments of Janet's, there were dark
moments during that week before she left Kew, when all the force of
dogma, all the waves of conventionality, beat against her breast;
but it was her faith in love that held her to the end; just as his
faith in the dogma itself, had held the Rev.
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