With infinite tact, she refrained from accepting his lofty pledge of eternal constancy. She also refrained from a similar commitment of her own affections. "Don’t misunderstand me, Janet," he said, as sadly as if her disagreement cut him to the soul. "I merely felt in honor bound to offer to marry you. I know better than you do what an unconventional step means. "All the more reason why I should learn by experience, then. No, Claude. If I married you, I’m sure I should soon stop loving you. The thought that you had a legal claim on my affection would be enough to kill it." "Oh, you mustn’t take the law so seriously, darling. Nobody does, nowadays." "I know nothing about the law, Claude," she said, repudiating all jurisprudence with one of her eloquent gestures. "Do you want us to become a careworn, broken-spirited, isolated married couple, hating all the other careworn, broken-spirited, isolated married couples of the western world? Do you want me to grow to hate and despise you as my mother hates and despises my father, as so many wives appear secretly to hate and despise their husbands?" "How can you say such monstrous things, Janet?" "How can you pretend to believe that love should be free?" she retorted. "Well," he replied, "I admit there’s a lot in what you say. I suppose," he added with a fine masculine irrelevance, "that we can always change our minds and get married later on if we choose to." He could not fully persuade himself that Janet really believed in free love. Nevertheless, he was hugely relieved to learn that, whatever her motive might be, she had no ulterior matrimonial designs on him. If only he could have suppressed a sneaking fear that he was "taking advantage" of Janet, as he called it, or satisfied himself that he was legitimately taking the good the gods provided, as the Outlaws boldly called a step of this sort! But Claude’s Bohemianism was only skin-deep. Like a good many Bohemians, he discarded traditional forms, costly conventions and social restrictions, chiefly in order to extract from social intercourse and philandering, the greatest amount of pleasure with the smallest amount of risk. Being a Bohemian was merely a sybaritic pastime for him. In short, Claude lacked the courage of his experiments. The only morality he genuinely believed in was the current morality (and immorality) of his peers. Thus loose love could be allowed to have a certain place in the scheme of things, but free love, as an avowed principle, was incontestably wrong. Claude might humor the model tenementers to the extent of using their free-love propaganda for his own ends. At heart, however, he was profoundly shocked by Janet’s stubborn contention that her views of marriage, though glaringly heterodox, were morally sound.