“He had a child, and when he asked Isabel to marry him he told her.”

They walked on for a while without anything further being said.  When Professor Hardage spoke, his tone was reflective: 

“It was this that made it impossible for her to marry him.  Her love for him was everything to her; he destroyed himself for her when he destroyed himself as an ideal.  Did he tell you the story?”

“Told everything.”

By and by the Judge resumed:  “It was a student’s love affair, and he would have married her.  She said that if she married him, there would never be any happiness for her in life; she was not in his social class, and, moreover, their marriage would never be understood as anything but a refuge from their shame, and neither of them would be able to deny this.  She disappeared sometime after the birth of the child.  More than a year later, maybe it was two years, he received a letter from her stating that she was married to a man in her own class and that her husband suspected nothing, and that she expected to live a faithful wife to him and be the mother of his children.  The child had been adopted, the traces of its parentage had been wiped out, those who had adopted it could do more for its life and honor than he could.  She begged him not to try to find her or ruin her by communicating the past to her husband.  That’s about all.”

“The old tragedy—­old except to them.”

“Old enough.  Were we not speaking the other day of how the old tragedies are the new ones?  I get something new out of this; you get the old.  What strikes me about it is that the man has declined to shirk—­that he has felt called upon not to injure any other life by his silence.  I wish I had a right to call it the mettle of a young American, his truthfulness.  As he put the case to me, what he got out of it was this:  Here was a girl deceiving her husband about her past—­otherwise he would never have married her.  As the world values such things, what it expected of Rowan was that he should go off and marry a girl and conceal his past.  He said that he would not lie to a classmate in college, he would not cheat a professor; was it any better silently to lie to and cheat the woman that he loved and expected to make the mother of his children?  Whatever he might have done with any one else, there was something in the nature of the girl whom he did come to love that made it impossible:  she drove untruthfulness out of him as health drives away disease.  He saved his honor with her, but he lost her.”

“She saved her honor through giving up him.  But it is high ground, it is a sad hilltop, that each has climbed to.”

“Hardage, we can climb so high that we freeze.”

They turned back.  The Judge spoke again with a certain sad pride: 

“I like their mettle, it is Shakespearean mettle, it is American mettle.  We lie in business, and we lie in religion, and we lie to women.  Perhaps if a man stopped lying to a woman, by and by he might begin to stop lying for money, and at last stop lying with his Maker.  But this boy, what can you and I do for him?  We can never tell the truth about this; and as we can try to clear him, unless we ourselves lie, we shall leave him the victim of a flock of lies.”