“I have learned such a lot,” she said, “in London. Love is marriage and an end.”
“I am not going to murmur marriage to Sylvia,” said Mr. George. “I have left it out altogether in my new book, the difficulty was to dispose of my man and woman. I overcame that by saying, ‘The end is the usual one.’ To return to Sylvia. I am not afraid of a breach of promise, but nowadays marriage is labelled a ‘question,’ and the reviewers are so tired of it; they are all married. I fear I must leave you now, Miss Launa. Good-bye.”
“Be a good boy! Don’t chase the cat or—Good-bye.”
“Suppose you were situated as they were,” said Mr. Wainbridge, “would you have sent him away? Would you have been afraid?”
“Afraid?” she repeated, with a contempt for fear. “No, I would have loved him—forever and ever. Why, because a man is bound to a vile woman, need he make the woman he loves vile because he loves her, or because he is bound?”
She looked at him, flushed with excitement, and doing battle for truth, and he realised that to some women love does not mean temptation because they are usually ignorant—at first. It would be difficult to explain this to Launa.
“I often wish,” she said, half to herself, “that we knew more of what will happen after death, if we were only told—should we try more? There is such temptation to become lethargic—to drown remembrance in the waters of Lethe.”
“You have no temptation. Do you want a reward? That is the lowest type of religion.”
“I do not want crowns, and vast seas of gold have no charm for me. Do you not suppose that Sylvia often wonders whether she will meet and know the man she loves again?”
“Certainly she does, and she will see him and know him here. He won’t be able to stay away.”
“You don’t believe in a future anywhere?”
“I believe in another world,” he said, “in another life where a verdict of temporary insanity as regards the foolishness of man’s doings in this life will be given with frequency. Most of us are not responsible for what we do. You know if a man or a woman kills his or herself the jury usually call it suicide while temporarily insane. Many of us commit self-murder for this life, but, in the eyes of the higher jury, if it exist at all, we are temporarily insane.”