She saw that he turned pale. “I’m obtuse, I suppose,” he said slowly. “I confess I don’t see what you’re driving at. Are you tired of the whole business? Or was _I_ simply a--an excuse for getting away? Perhaps you didn’t care to travel alone? Was that it? And now you want to chuck me?” His voice had grown harsh. “You owe me a straight answer, you know; don’t be tender-hearted!” Her eyes swam as she leaned to him. “Don’t you see it’s because I care--because I care so much? Oh, Ralph! Can’t you see how it would humiliate me? Try to feel it as a woman would! Don’t you see the misery of being made your wife in this way? If I’d known you as a girl--that would have been a real marriage! But now--this vulgar fraud upon society--and upon a society we despised and laughed at--this sneaking back into a position that we’ve voluntarily forfeited: don’t you see what a cheap compromise it is? We neither of us believe in the abstract ‘sacredness’ of marriage; we both know that no ceremony is needed to consecrate our love for each other; what object can we have in marrying, except the secret fear of each that the other may escape, or the secret longing to work our way back gradually--oh, very gradually--into the esteem of the people whose conventional morality we have always ridiculed and hated? And the very fact that, after a decent interval, these same people would come and dine with us--the women who talk about the indissolubility of marriage, and who would let me die in a gutter to-day because I am ‘leading a life of sin’--doesn’t that disgust you more than their turning their backs on us now? I can stand being cut by them, but I couldn’t stand their coming to call and asking what I meant to do about visiting that unfortunate Mrs. 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.”