“I have them myself.  It’s proof of our superior delicacy of organisation,” she gravely told him.

“Oh, I don’t know.  The feeling that comes on you when you’ve taken particular care to turn up for an important appointment, and you get to the place ten minutes before the time, and find there’s nobody there, and wait about, and suddenly find you’ve come a day late.  And still you go on hanging round, feeling there must be something you can do, although you know you can’t.  It stays months sometimes.  A sense of having missed some opportunity that won’t come again.  I don’t know what it means.  But it turns life sour.  It seems to take the power out of one’s fingers, to make one’s brainstuff hot and thick and dark.  It makes one’s work seem not worth doing.  But that’s all over.  It won’t come again now I have you!” He sat down on the basket chair and drew her on to his knee, giving her light caresses to correct the heavy things he had just been saying.  She received them abstractedly, as if she were thinking silent vows.  “Ellen, I don’t know what your eyes are like.  The sea never looks kind like that, and they are wittier than flowers.  You’re not really like a flower at all, you know, though I believe that in our circumstances it’s considered the proper thing for me to tell you that you are.  You’re too important, and you wouldn’t like growing in a garden, which even wild flowers seem to want to do.  I’ll tell you what you’re like.  You’re like an olive tree.  They’re slim like you, and their branches go up like arms, as if they were asking for a vote, and they grow dangerously (just as you would if you were a tree) on the very edge of cliffs; and one looks past them at the blue sea, just as I look past you at the glorious life I’m going to have now I’ve got you.  Dearest, when can we get married?”

“Oh!” exclaimed Ellen, greatly pleased.  “Are you in a position to keep a wife?”

He burst out laughing.  “You darling!  Do you know, I believe I could keep two.”

She did not laugh.  “It’s wicked to think that if you did I couldn’t divorce you.  You’d have to be cruel as well.  I heard Brynhild Ormiston say so.”

He went on laughing.  “Well, don’t let that hold you back.  I dare say I could, rise to being cruel as well.  Let’s look on the bright side of things.  Tell me, darling, when will you marry me?”

“Those iniquitous marriage-laws,” she murmured.  “It makes one think....”  She looked down, weighing grave things.

“My dearest, you can forget the marriage-laws.  I will adore you so, I will be so faithful, I will work my fingers to the bone so gladly to make you kind to me, that there is no divorce law in the world will let you get rid of me.”  Shy at his own sincerity, he kissed her hair, and whispered in her ear, “I mean it, Ellen.”

She raised her head with that bravery he loved so much, and gave him her lips to kiss, but her eyes were still wide and set with reluctance.