"From watching you, I rather thought it was," said Janet, stung into sudden irony. There was a pause. He tried to take her hand, but she drew it sharply away, with difficulty repressing her tears. After a while, he began again, with impetuous candor: "Janet, don’t go into this adventure with your eyes shut. Remember, you can’t give yourself up to an experiment in free love without giving up everything else. That is the strongest argument against the step. All your gifts, all your energy, all your purpose will be consumed in explaining, defending, evading. Your whole life will be one long course of swallowing the consequences and warding off criticism. Do you wish to be a life-long martyr to free love, like Cornelia?" "I’ve never posed as a martyr to anything—not even to drink," said Janet, recovering her good humor. "Then why become one? Martyrdom is all very well for fanatics like your mother who enjoy it, or for idlers like Cornelia who have nothing better to do. But you are neither a fanatic nor an idler; you are a worker." "But when one believes that an institution has served its turn, isn’t it one’s duty to destroy it?" "Institutions are never destroyed. They are sometimes transformed, as tadpoles are into frogs." "Are you sure? Cornelia says that every free union is a mine exploded beneath marriage. I think she’s right." "A mine! Better call it a squib, Janet. And all the trouble you invite will be like laying a long and elaborate fuse to ignite the squib." "Oh, you have no ideals left!" she cried, revolted at this demolition of her romantic conceptions. "I have a little common sense left," he answered. "We can’t escape the customs or the institutions of our time, however much we may disbelieve in them. Flying in the face of a decadent institution does not destroy it. It only gives it a new lease of life by putting the props of public sympathy and traditional morality at the disposal of its defenders. Look at the case of George Eliot. Did her entirely justifiable free union help the cause of marriage reform? No. It actually turned her into a defender of the very institution she had set out to challenge." "What a very wise young man; this wise young man must be," she said, parodying a line of Gilbert’s. "No side-tracking! Promise me you’ll turn the matter over in your mind." "In my mind? Yes. But what about my heart?" she said. And with dancing eyes she sang: "’Oh, the heart is a free and a fetterless thing, A wave of the ocean, a bird on the wing.’" Her voice turned his blood to paradisaical currents. "If you sing that again, I shall kiss you on the spot, in public or out of it," said the tormented young man. "Why, Robert, what abysses of passion lurk hidden in you!" she exclaimed mockingly. "I believe you said you’d always treat me just like a man. Do you talk like this to your male chums?" Then demurely: "We’d better go home at once."