She returned his smile, but with knitted brows.

“It’s really serious—­you needn’t laugh.  And it’s only fair to you to let you know the kind of a wife you are getting, before it is too late.  For instance, I believe in divorce, although I can’t imagine it for us.  One never can, I suppose, in this condition—­that’s the trouble.  I have seen so many immoral marriages that I can’t think God intends people to live degraded.  And I’m sick and tired of the argument that an indissoluble marriage under all conditions is good for society.  That a man or woman, the units of society, should violate the divine in themselves for the sake of society is absurd.  They are merely setting an example to their children to do the same thing, which means that society in that respect will never get any better.  In this love that has come to us we have achieved an ideal which I have never thought to reach.  Oh, John, I’m sure you won’t misunderstand me when I say that I would rather die than have to lower it.”

“No,” he answered, “I shall not misunderstand you.”

“Even though it is so difficult to put into words what I mean.  I don’t feel that we really need the marriage service, since God has already joined us together.  And it is not through our own wills, somehow, but through his.  Divorce would not only be a crime against the spirit, it would be an impossibility while we feel as we do.  But if love should cease, then God himself would have divorced us, punished us by taking away a priceless gift of which we were not worthy.  He would have shut the gates of Eden in our faces because we had sinned against the Spirit.  It would be quite as true to say ’whom God has put asunder no man may join together.’  Am I hurting you?”

Her hand was on the arm of his chair, and the act of laying his own on it was an assurance stronger than words.  Alison sighed.

“Yes, I believed you would understand, even though I expressed myself badly,—­that you would help me, that you have found a solution.  I used to regard the marriage service as a compromise, as a lowering of the ideal, as something mechanical and rational put in the place of the spiritual; that it was making the Church, and therefore God, conform to the human notion of what the welfare of society ought to be.  And it is absurd to promise to love.  We have no control over our affections.  They are in God’s hands, to grant or withdraw.

“And yet I am sure—­this is new since I have known you—­that if such a great love as ours be withdrawn it would be an unpardonable wrong for either of us to marry again.  That is what puzzles me—­confounds the wisdom I used to have, and which in my littleness and pride I thought so sufficient.  I didn’t believe in God, but now I feel him, through you, though I cannot define him.  And one of many reasons why I could not believe in Christ was because I took it for granted that he taught, among other things, a continuation of the marriage relation after love had ceased to justify it.”