Play for time, John--he'll bring her around.
Do you mean to marry her or not? Speak my language!
[_ERNEST releases HELEN and steps across to JOHN._
You'll go with this damned fanatic only over my dead body.
And that will only cry aloud the thing you wish to hide from the world you fear.
[_Just now JEAN is seen slowly returning from the garden without REX. Her pretty head is bent and, busy with her own sad thoughts, she is startled by the following:_
There are laws to prevent marriage in some cases but none to enforce marriage on women--unless they will it.
Enforce! Do you think I'll ever _allow_ a sister of mine to marry a libertine?
[_thinks they are discussing her, and is outraged_]
But I'm not going to marry him! My engagement is broken.
[_General consternation. Sobbing, JEAN runs into house._
My God, what next? Lucy, don't let Rex get away! You know what he'll do--and when he sobers up, it may be too late. [_To ERNEST._] As for you, you snake, you get right out of here.
If she leaves this house now, it's all up.
A woman who will give herself to a man without marriage is no sister of mine.
[_about to go, turns, leaning on ERNEST. To all_]
Give!... But if I _sold_ myself, as you are forcing poor little Jean to do, to a libertine she does not love, who does not love her--that is not sin! That is respectability! To urge and aid her to entrap a man into marriage by playing the shameless tricks of the only trade men want women to learn--that is holy matrimony. But to give yourself of your own free will to the man you love and trust and can help, the man who loves and needs and has won the right to have you--oh, if this is sin, then let me live and die a sinner!
[_She turns to ERNEST, gives him a look of complete love and trust, then bursts into tears upon his shoulder, his arms enfolding her protectingly._
_It is well along in the afternoon of the same busy day of rest. Most unaccountably--until the JUDGE accounts for it later--the terrace has been decked out with festoons and flowers since the excitement of the morning. Japanese lanterns have been hung, though it is not yet time to light them and though it is Sunday in a pious household._
_Most incongruously and lugubriously, LUCY is pacing to and fro in silent concern._