“Life is complex, of course; isn’t it the very recognition of that fact that separates us from the people who see it _tout d’une pièce?_ If _they_ are right--if marriage is sacred in itself and the individual must always be sacrificed to the family--then there can be no real marriage between us, since our--our being together is a protest against the sacrifice of the individual to the family.” She interrupted herself with a laugh. “You’ll say now that I’m giving you a lecture on sociology! Of course one acts as one can--as one must, perhaps--pulled by all sorts of invisible threads; but at least one needn’t pretend, for social advantages, to subscribe to a creed that ignores the complexity of human motives--that classifies people by arbitrary signs, and puts it in everybody’s reach to be on Mrs. Tillotson’s visiting-list. It may be necessary that the world should be ruled by conventions--but if we believed in them, why did we break through them? And if we don’t believe in them, is it honest to take advantage of the protection they afford?” Gannett hesitated. “One may believe in them or not; but as long as they do rule the world it is only by taking advantage of their protection that one can find a _modus vivendi.”_ “Do outlaws need a _modus vivendi?”_ He looked at her hopelessly. Nothing is more perplexing to man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions. She thought she had scored a point and followed it up passionately. “You do understand, don’t you? You see how the very thought of the thing humiliates me! We are together to-day because we choose to be--don’t let us look any farther than that!” She caught his hands. “_Promise_ me you’ll never speak of it again; promise me you’ll never _think_ of it even,” she implored, with a tearful prodigality of italics. Through what followed--his protests, his arguments, his final unconvinced submission to her wishes--she had a sense of his but half-discerning all that, for her, had made the moment so tumultuous. They had reached that memorable point in every heart-history when, for the first time, the man seems obtuse and the woman irrational. It was the abundance of his intentions that consoled her, on reflection, for what they lacked in quality. After all, it would have been worse, incalculably worse, to have detected any over-readiness to understand her. II