"Oh, I'll believe it if it's any comfort to you." When I talked it over with Jerry afterward I could see the queer, twisted kind of moral standard by which he made it appear that any irregularity of his during his wife's life, was unfaithfulness to her, and not Sarah. She had come back with Jerry and I was walking with him to the City Hall for the license; he had begun by protesting just as I had, and had surrendered to his conviction that nothing less would satisfy Sarah. "After all," I said, "it shows that there is some sort of harmony between them, that he should realize that the only reparation he could make would be to come back to her." "Cur!" Jerry kicked at the pavement, "to pollute the life of a woman like Sarah with his wretched existence." "That's how you feel," I reminded him, "but remember how all these years Sarah has felt polluted by the thought that she wasn't married to him." "Oh, _damn_!" "Sarah thinks, and I'm beginning to think so too, that there is something to marriage that binds besides the ceremony." "I know." Jerry's wife had left him that summer and though he knew it was the best thing for both of them, he was trying to get her back again: "It binds of itself. If only they would tell us that in the beginning instead of putting up all this stuff about its being the law and religion. We think we can get out of it just by getting out of the law, and none of us know better until it is too late." "People like Sarah know. They know just the way swallows know to go south in winter. You'll see; she will be happier married, not because it is pleasant but because it is right." They were married that afternoon in our apartment, and it was not until I was settled in the hotel where I had elected to stay until I could find suitable quarters, that I realized that the chance of this marriage had accomplished for me the freedom that I had not known how to obtain for myself.