"It is only that _I_ have no right to. Now you are going to be angry with me."
He saw her eyes quiver. "God forbid! I misunderstood. And you are sensitive, dearest."
"I am sensitive," she said reluctantly. "More than ever, perhaps, since I have ceased practising my religion."
Her words came unwillingly. "I could not help it."
He saw what an effort it cost her to answer. The words were dragged from her. "I could not live with my husband and practise it."
"So much the more reason for quitting him, isn’t it?"
"Oh, I want to. I want to be free. If I only could."
"Alice, you speak like one in despair. There is nothing to be so stirred about. You want to be free, I want you to be, you shall be. Don’t get excited over the matter of a divorce. Your eyes are like saucers at the thought. Why?"
"Only because for me it is the final disgrace--not to be separated from him--but to marry again with him alive! It means the last step for me. And the public scandal! What will they say of me, who knew me at home?"
"Alice, this is the wildest supersensitiveness. The whole world lives in divorced marriages. Public scandal? No one will ever hear of your divorce. The courts that grant your plea will attend to suppressing everything."
"Why not? We abase them every day to so many worse things that their delicate gorges will not rise at a little favor like that."
She looked at him gravely. "What does the world say of you for doing such things?"
"I never ask. You know, of course, I never pay any attention to what the world says of anything I do. Why should I? It would be difficult for the world to despise me as much as I despise it. You don’t understand the world. All you need is my strength. I felt that from the very first--that if I could give you my strength the combination would be perfect. That is why I am so helplessly in love with you--my strength must be yours. I want to put you on a throne. Then I stand by, see?--and guard your majesty with a great club. And I can do it."
They laughed together, for he spoke guardedly, as to being heard of others, but with ominous energy. "I believe you could," murmured Alice.
"Don’t worry over your religion. I will make you practise it. I will make a devotee of you."