It was in the first heat of her moral indignation that she had met Clement Westall.  She had seen at once that he was “interested,” and had fought off the discovery, dreading any influence that should draw her back into the bondage of conventional relations.  To ward off the peril she had, with an almost crude precipitancy, revealed her opinions to him.  To her surprise, she found that he shared them.  She was attracted by the frankness of a suitor who, while pressing his suit, admitted that he did not believe in marriage.  Her worst audacities did not seem to surprise him:  he had thought out all that she had felt, and they had reached the same conclusion.  People grew at varying rates, and the yoke that was an easy fit for the one might soon become galling to the other.  That was what divorce was for:  the readjustment of personal relations.  As soon as their necessarily transitive nature was recognized they would gain in dignity as well as in harmony.  There would be no farther need of the ignoble concessions and connivances, the perpetual sacrifice of personal delicacy and moral pride, by means of which imperfect marriages were now held together.  Each partner to the contract would be on his mettle, forced to live up to the highest standard of self-development, on pain of losing the other’s respect and affection.  The low nature could no longer drag the higher down, but must struggle to rise, or remain alone on its inferior level.  The only necessary condition to a harmonious marriage was a frank recognition of this truth, and a solemn agreement between the contracting parties to keep faith with themselves, and not to live together for a moment after complete accord had ceased to exist between them.  The new adultery was unfaithfulness to self.

It was, as Westall had just reminded her, on this understanding that they had married.  The ceremony was an unimportant concession to social prejudice:  now that the door of divorce stood open, no marriage need be an imprisonment, and the contract therefore no longer involved any diminution of self-respect.  The nature of their attachment placed them so far beyond the reach of such contingencies that it was easy to discuss them with an open mind; and Julia’s sense of security made her dwell with a tender insistence on Westall’s promise to claim his release when he should cease to love her.  The exchange of these vows seemed to make them, in a sense, champions of the new law, pioneers in the forbidden realm of individual freedom:  they felt that they had somehow achieved beatitude without martyrdom.

This, as Julia now reviewed the past, she perceived to have been her theoretical attitude toward marriage.  It was unconsciously, insidiously, that her ten years of happiness with Westall had developed another conception of the tie; a reversion, rather, to the old instinct of passionate dependency and possessorship that now made her blood revolt at the mere hint of change.  Change?  Renewal?  Was that what they had