Jack Wingfield being a student--a newspaper student--of contemporary history, was aware of the numerous standpoints from which marriage is discussed, with well-assumed seriousness, by people whom he suspected of having their tongues in their cheeks all the time; but, as has just been stated, he had never himself given a thought to the mysticism of marriage or the symbolism of a wedding. He felt that it was enough for him to know that when his time came to fall in love with a girl and to desire to make her his wife, if the girl consented, he would marry her according to the law of the land, and she would be his wife. Well, this had all come about; he had fallen in love and he had married the girl according to the law of the land; and was there anyone to say that she was not his wife or that he was not her husband? Of course he knew that there were quite a number of people who would say so; but what was their opinion worth? If she was the wife of someone else, she should, in the opinion of these people, leave him and go to someone else--yes, go to live with that swindling scoundrel--go to be the perpetual companion of a felon and a trickster who had shown his indifference to her and to all that she had suffered as his victim. What was the value of the opinion of people who should, with eyes turned up, assert the doctrine of the sacredness of marriage, and the necessity of acting in the case of himself and Priscilla in sympathy with their doctrines? These were the people who regard the conduct of Enoch Arden with abhorrence. Was he not actually allowing his wife to “live in sin” with the man who had supplanted him? No; Priscilla and he had married in good faith, and they should be regarded by all sensible and unprejudiced people as man and wife. There was no man living, worthy of the name of a man, who would not call him a cur if he took any other view of the matter than this. The idea of his handing over that girl to be dealt with by a felon according to his will, simply because the rascal had succeeded in getting the better of her father and mother... Jack Wingfield laughed. “Let him come and take her,” he said to himself. CHAPTER XXX That was what he was longing for--for the claimant to come in person and lay a hand upon her. He felt that he would have given half his estate for the chance of answering the fellow as he should be answered--not by any reference to the opinions of those half-pagan patriarchs known as The Fathers; not by any reference to the views promulgated in the Middle Ages by that succession of thieving voluptuaries, murderers and excommunicators, the heads of the Church of Rome; or by modern sentimentalists struggling to reach the focus of the public eye--no, but by the aid of a dog-whip.