"Me! I had no more to do with her final choice than your mother had. I did not even know the name of the man she married." "But you talked sentiment, poetry, honor, and such stuff to her." "Never. She would not have understood me if I had." "What do you mean?" "What I say, Christina turned sentiment, poetry, honor, and such stuff, into laughter. She saw only one side of any person or thing--the comic side. If she could mimic you, she partly understood you; if she could not mimic you, then you were uninteresting and unknowable. But Christina was as kind to me as she could be to any one. She is gone, and I have no friend left here." "Am I not your friend?" "You are my husband. I have had many friends, none of them were the least like you." "A poor man between his mother and his wife is in a desperate fix." "He is, because he has no business to be in such a position. It is an unnatural one--a forbidden one. Until a man is willing to give up his mother, he has no right to take a wife. Under all conditions it must be one or the other; the two existing happily together are so rare, that they are merely exceptions that prove the rule." "It would have been very hard on my mother, had I given her up for a wife." "Yet your mother took her husband away from his mother, and so backward goes it, to the Eden days of every race. And you also made the same mistake that Rebekah told Isaac she was weary of her life for--you married a stranger, and because of this, she is continually asking, as Rebekah did, What good is my life to me with this daughter of Heth under my roof? And also she has made our lives of no good to us!" "Is it not my duty to love and honor my mother? Is it not right?" "It is your duty, and your right also, to love and honor the wife whom you have persuaded to leave her father and mother, her home and friends." "Then the right of the mother, and the right of the wife, are both positive?" "So positive that both cannot be served in the same place, and at the same time; for the one right will be broken to pieces against the other right, since there is no community of feeling between the family claim of the mother and the moral and natural claim of the wife." "Then what is a man to do?" "'A man shall leave father and mother, and cleave unto his wife.' That is the imperative, and ultimate decision of the God and Father of us all. And if it were not the nearly universal rule, what miserable, loveless children would be born, and how the jealous, quarrelling families of the earth would have become hateful in God's sight. We have only to consider our own case. Until your mother came between us, we loved each other truly, and were very happy." "A man with a big business, Dora, has something else to think of than love."