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 piece?_ 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?"
Gannett hesitated.
Pages:
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86