"The house is so much happier since I came to it. It was occupied before by an old woman who never set foot outside the door for thirty years. We talk abusively about life in London, but life in villages is even more sordid. Country people live even more meanly and graspingly than townsfolk. There is more stagnation. They are all inbred. The people here are all married to cousins, and they are queer in the head and abnormal. Personally, I think the great towns grew out of the necessity for breaking all that up. English life was far too like a novel by Emily Brontë. It had to be broken up and readjusted. It was much more that than the desire for money. You are both such children that you have hardly had time to realize the kind of life in which you were brought up. You have both shaken free of it with the violence that makes one so hopeful of the younger generation. When you are as old as I am, you will be able to realize far more than I have done. The readjustment will be more nearly completed. The reaction from the evils of industrial life will be even more violent than the reaction from those of agrarian life. You will know how rare love is, and you will rejoice that it was given to you to feel it, even though, as it must not, it were to end to-night." She turned to René and smiled at him with her soft eyes. "Cathleen has told me." "Yes," he said. "I seem to have floundered into being forced to live my own life in my own way." "Cathleen too. You can only do it together. Neither of you could put up with a mate who desired less and regarded every emotion as a bond instead of a liberation. Love is the release of the spirit or it is not love." "And if others are to be unhappy?" "That is their affair. You don't seem to have let that worry you much until now." "I never saw things so clearly before. There came a crisis, and I just plunged blindly. I have a horror of doing that again." "But I don't think you'll ever mind making a fool of yourself, René. You never did," said Cathleen. "Perhaps not, my dear, but I should hate to make a fool of you." "Everyone," said Lotta, "makes mistakes. It isn't everyone who will admit them. Once they are admitted they often turn out extremely profitable. Really I don't see that you two need have any but financial anxiety, and that is easily surmounted. Marriage? Neither of you has a scrap of conventional religion. You can't possibly be worried by scruples. Really the marriage laws of this country are in such a mess that it has become almost a duty for decent people to transgress them. They won't be altered in our time, so there is nothing for it but to disregard them. You have quite enough real difficulties to face without troubling yourselves about artificial ones. A few virtuous people won't know you? What are they to you or you to them?" "It all comes back," said Cathleen, "to that girl." "She took her risks. She knew that. They have courage, some of those girls."