"Such is a brief statement of the perfidy of the woman I loved, and its consequences. And this is why I am out here on this perilous expedition, searching for something that I care very little about. I think you will agree with me that it admits of no remedy."
"It does not look that way to me," I responded. "I would be unwilling to condemn your affianced bride until I had heard her side of the story. It may be that her marriage to your uncle was secured by unfair means, and that when she discovered the fraud, in her desperation she started out to find you. In that case, the remedy would be for you to find her and renew your plighted faith."
"Never!" said Captain Ganoe. "Even if your supposed case is correct, it could not set aside the facts. She knew that, in marrying my uncle, she was false to me, and when she deserted him with no legal cause for separation, she was false to her husband to whom she was bound in the holy bonds of matrimony. She acted from her own choice. She was not compelled to engage herself to me, and no law could have forced her to marry my uncle. Her conduct in both cases reveals her innate perfidy of character, and under no circumstances could I, as an honorable man, accept such a woman as my wife. Her tarnished reputation, if nothing else, would place an insurmountable barrier between us even if she were not legally the wife of another man."
I was paralyzed. I had indeed succeeded in getting from him an emphatic expression of sentiment covering my own case. I had penetrated the innermost recesses of his being, but had fanned to a flame the slumbering fires of a volcano, only to be submerged in the eruption of molten lava.
The blow was so unexpected and so sudden, that I was stupefied, and my astonishment left no room for grief, which gave me a moment for reflection. Here I was, in the ship with him, far within the Arctic Circle, at the beginning of the Arctic winter, and with the certainty of being locked up in the ice for months if not for years. I could not get away from him if I would, and from his own lips I had heard my conduct denounced as the acme of perfidy, and my love spurned as something treacherous and vile. Bitterly and in the most emphatic manner, had he declared that as an honorable man, he could never associate himself in the tender relations of marital love, with one of my tarnished reputation. In his own estimate, he had already assigned me a place among the most debased and abandoned characters, and all there was left for me to do was to preserve my disguise, in order to secure even respectful treatment from the man I loved.