"Easy stepping stones for little feet—so to speak?" "You know quite well what I mean. Some day you’ll go back to America—" "Is this a hint or a prediction, or both—" "Don’t be silly, Janet. I’m thinking of your future. Your future in your own country, naturally. Mrs. Jerome is a woman of enormous influence. You know how it is over there. Much gold will wash all guilt away." "You mean my chequered past?" asked Janet, with a smile. "Yes," said Cornelia, adding handsomely, "although your affair with Claude Fontaine will probably be quite forgotten by that time. Nobody will remember it." "Robert Lloyd will!" Cornelia was up in arms at once. She always was, when Janet mentioned Robert’s name. "What difference does that make? You aren’t going to marry _him_, I suppose?" "I suppose not. He’s too poor, for one thing. He isn’t going to ask me, for another." "One would imagine you wanted him to," said Cornelia, with concise sarcasm. "We got along splendidly as partners." "Partners! What has that to do with marriage?" "What has anything to do with marriage? I understood your reasons when you believed that marriage was a prison. I confess I don’t understand your reasons now that you believe marriage to be a haven of bliss. Mind, I don’t say it is a prison, and I don’t say that it _isn’t_ a haven of bliss." Janet tried to check her sub-ironical impulses: they were irrepressible. "I feel too much in the dark about the whole thing," she went on, "to be as cocksure as I used to be. But if one isn’t to marry a man because one has found him to be a splendid companion in the wear and tear of working together, why is one to marry him?" "How you do run on, Araminta! Prisons and hells, Paradises and havens of bliss—you jump from one extreme to the other. Who mentioned these things? My dear, one marries a man because he calls to what is deepest and truest in one. Because he responds to—" "The mating instinct?" "How can you sit there and say such vulgar things?" "Vulgar! Well, you _are_ going it! Isn’t the mating instinct as deep and true as any of them?" "It isn’t a reason for marriage," said Cornelia, in staccato accents. "And you know perfectly well I never said or thought it was. Quite the reverse. I opposed marriage because the sex instinct, which is what induces most people to marry, is a good ground for a temporary union but not a good ground for a permanent one." "Then there _are_ good reasons for a permanent union?" "Yes. And they absorb the sex reason a million times over." "It’s easy for you to talk like that, Cornelia, with Harry thinking that the sun rises in one of your eyes and sets in the other. But where shall _I_ find a Harry to be absorbed in me a million times over like that?" "If you go on making nasty sarcastic replies to all my well-meant suggestions, I shall wash my hands of you," said Cornelia, rising with frigid haughtiness. She added, on a superior note: