They have tamed many wild things in a world growm standardized; they have tried for centuries to bridle love and make it run in harness; but love refuses to be tamed and standardized by the marriage service. You don’t scare love away by the bogey-sign, “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” Love’s wild, it’s free, blind to the handcuffs which Church and State pathetically try to rivet on a given pair, lawless because it knows no law, timeless because it know’s no time. Sometimes it lasts while a butterfly could suck a flower’s honey, sometimes the space of a man’s life, and they have tried to regulate this love, this volatility, to pretend that because it sometimes does not evaporate, it never evaporates till death. They sought to link love with property, and to control the uncontrollable. They make laws round love, which is like enclosing an eagle in a cobweb; and we suffer for their laws. We keep the law and suffer; break it and we suffer. She knew that she would suffer, but she would bring beauty to Sam. He hadn’t capitulated to her talk, and she thought that he had no chance in Manchester. Perhaps her Sam was with her in his dreams, but each dawn brought him to accustomed ugliness, and habit clogged his days with mud. He couldn’t escape, he wanted wings, and she was there to bring them him. He did not know there was another side to life, but she would show it him. He should see her beauty, and, through that, the beauty of the other side. She was presumptuous, but presumption is a quality of faith. She interfered, but there are three inevitable interferences in life--birth, love and death--and hers was one of these. It was them all: it was love and the birth of the new Sam, and the death of the old. She interfered, where she had right to interfere. She loved. Time passed between the day when she came to her decision and the day when they acted upon it, and she never knew how long it was nor how she spent it. She belonged to a living fact, and there were shadows in the world, such as her work, her mother, the silly detail of arranging to go away, and Stewart, a haunting shadow of one Sunday afternoon, but these were unrealities and only her idea was real. She never remembered how she put it to Sam, nor what he said, though she had a hazy memory that he was desperately shocked and more profoundly humorous than ever before. But she thought that he was only shocked as the right thing shocks by rightness, not as the wrong by wrongness: and she knew that difficulties melted: and they came. They came to the Marbeck Inn and entered into their kingdom of a week. CHAPTER XX--THE MARBECK INN |SAM was vilely dull about it all at first: his comprehension, stuck in the mud, failed utterly to rise to the occasion, but before long; he was looking back with horror on his turgid mental processes when she told him that they would come away together.