“No.  You know perfectly well I am not going to marry you,” she said softly, looking up at me with a smile in her eyes, great pools of blue beneath their exquisitely arched lids.

“It is ridiculous to suppose that you, an artist of twenty-eight, will want to keep faithful to one woman all the rest of your life—­or her life.  It would be very bad for you, if you did.  One can’t go against Nature, and Nature has not arranged things that way.  Marriage is a pleasure perhaps; but Nature never arranged, marriage, and a man should not allow himself unnatural pleasures.”

She was really laughing now, but I knew her resolve was perfectly serious and I did not see how I could break it up.

“Well, but some men do keep to one woman all their life and are none the worse for it; look at a country clergyman for instance.”

Viola raised her eyebrows with a laugh.

“How can you be sure of the country clergyman?  I expect he goes up to town sometimes....  However, of course I admit he is fairly faithful, but how about being none the worse for it?  A country clergyman is about the most undeveloped creature you could have, and a great artist is the most developed, the nearest approach to a god of all human beings.”

I did not answer, but sat silent staring at her.  She looked such a sweet little Saxon schoolgirl in her white dress, but with such tremendous character and power in those great shining eyes.

“But if we marry now,” I said at last, “and anything should ... should come between us, I don’t see it would be any worse than....”

“Than if we were living together without marriage,” she put in quickly.  “Yes, I think it would.  Look here, if we marry now with a great blaze and fuss, and invite all our friends to see the event, which is great nonsense anyway, and then you see some other woman later you covet, it seems to me there are only three ways open to us:  either you go without the woman and suffer very much in consequence and always owe me a grudge for standing in your way; or you take her and I have to profess to see nothing and look on quietly, which I could never stand, it would send me mad; or we must have all the trouble and worry and scandal of a divorce and call in the public to witness our quarrel; and why should we have the public to interfere in our affairs?” she added, her eyes flashing.  “What is it to them whom I love or whom I live with, whom I leave or quarrel with?  These are all private matters.”

“And if we live together and the same thing happens?” I pursued quietly.

“Why, then we should separate, only without any trouble, any publicity; we should fall apart naturally.  If you preferred any one else, you must go to her; I should slip away out of your life, and we should each be free and untied.”

“If it’s so much better for the man to change,” I said smiling, “it must be the same for the woman.”

“So it is,” rejoined Viola quickly; “the more men a woman has the more developed she is, the better for her morally, if there is no conventional disgrace attaching to it.  Amongst the Greeks, Aspasia and all those women of her class were far more intellectual, more developed than the wives who were kept at home to spin and rear children.”