I felt as if something were strangling me.

“A woman lives in her heart, doesn’t she?” he said.  “Love is everything to her . . . everything except her religion.  Will it be possible—­this renunciation . . . will it be possible for you either?”

I felt as if all the blood in my body were running away from me.

“It will not.  You know it will not.  You will never be able to renounce your love.  Neither of us will he able to renounce it.  It isn’t possible.  It isn’t human. . . .  Well, what then?  If we continue to love each other—­you here and I down there—­we shall be just as guilty in the eyes of the Church, shan’t we?”

I did not answer him, and after a moment he came closer to me on the seat and said almost in a whisper: 

“Then think again, Mary.  Only give one glance to the horrible life that is before you when I am gone.  You have been married a year . . . only a year . . . and you have suffered terribly.  But there is worse to come.  Your husband’s coarse infidelity has been shocking, but there will be something more shocking than his infidelity—­his affection.  Have you never thought of that?”

I started and shuddered, feeling as if somebody must have told him the most intimate secret of my life.  Coming still closer he said: 

“Forgive me, dear.  I’m bound to speak plainly now.  If I didn’t I should never forgive myself in the future . . .  Listen!  Your husband will get over his fancy for this . . . this woman.  He’ll throw her off, as he has thrown off women of the same kind before.  What will happen then?  He’ll remember that you belong to him . . . that he has rights in you . . . that you are his wife and he is your husband . . . that the infernal law which denies you the position of an equal human being gives him a right—­a legal right—­to compel your obedience.  Have you never thought of that?”

For one moment we looked into each other’s eyes; then he took hold of my hand and, speaking very rapidly, said: 

“That’s the life that is before you when I am gone—­to live with this man whom you loathe . . . year after year, as long as life lasts . . . occupying the same house, the same room, the same . . .”

I uttered an involuntary cry and he stopped.

“Martin,” I said, “there is something you don’t know.”

And then, I told him—­it was forced out of me—­my modesty went down in the fierce battle with a higher pain, and I do not know whether it was my pride or my shame or my love that compelled me to tell him, but I did tell him—­God knows how—­that I could not run the risk he referred to because I was not in that sense my husband’s wife and never had been.

The light was behind me, and my face was in the darkness; but still I covered it with my hands while I stammered out the story of my marriage day and the day after, and of the compact I had entered into with my husband that only when and if I came to love him should he claim my submission as a wife.