Out of the thick turmoil of the French Market and the gaudy fittings of the Hotel Iberville they found their way to the river, and wandered up its leisurely levee. The ancient lure of the sea spoke in the rank smell of drying nets and decaying barnacles on the tide-abandoned piles, of redolent fishing catboats and tarry roping. She curled behind him on a solitary bale of cotton awaiting belated shipment, staring out at the muddy water, and the tangled masts and rigging up and down stream. "How would you like to sail the seven seas?" she asked idly. "Down this river, over the gulf and the Caribbean, and then out across the unroaded way of the world's ocean?" Watching him dust his feather-gray ash on a splintery beam, she shielded a lighted match to give new life to the moist brown mass packed within the bowl. "With you along?" "That would be yours to say. You must remain free, as I am; if love lasts, yes; if not----" "And that very freedom, that modern marriage includes, adds preciousness to love; the danger of losing forges a stronger bond." "Thus freedom involves a slavery greater, because voluntary. Where my heart is, I am content to serve," she smiled. But something within her doubted how deep this shrining of freedom went. She had noticed, at last night's opera, an attractive girl in another box bow to her husband with provoking familiarity. "Louise Richard, a friend of Lane Cullom's," he had explained; "I met her in Adamsville." But ... her husband! If any woman presumed to get free with him, modernism would be flung aside for primitive emotions. Mating bred possession.... He was such a lover! She smiled a perverse thanksgiving that he was--a little--coarse. Love must be planted in the earth, to grow toward the stars. Pelham's thought drove down a not dissimilar channel. Of course Jane was entitled to hold to her idea of freedom; there was little chance of her ever wanting to make it more than an idea. But let a man dare sneak into her affections, and there would be an immediate casualty list, which would not include a descendant of the Judsons. He was amused at the bloodthirsty throwback; nevertheless, he would do something.... His thought recurred to the sight of Louise Richard, between the acts at the theater; how incomparably superior Jane was! And yet.... Freedom in love had its compensations.... Louise had said something about revisiting Adamsville.... At once he put the half-formed fancy out of his mind; Jane was enough, now and henceforth. He returned, at a tangent, to the former subject. "Just as you are free to remain skeptical about socialism, while I am of it." "Not skeptical, Pelham; but.... Put it this way. It hasn't the overwhelming importance to me that it has to you. To me, woman's cause comes first; with suffrage an essential incident. I do see that socialism doesn't go to the roots of everything."