so much pleasanter to drift on with our thumbs to our noses, and much more exciting, and incidentally that end you are anticipating so seriously would be much nearer.”
He relit his pipe and went on smoking. Then he got up and put more wood on the fire, and after raking in the straggled pieces, he stood looking down at her. The fitful light showed him that her face was absurdly troubled and serious. He dropped down beside her and laid his pipe on the ground.
“Valerie, I ask you to go through the marriage ceremony with me because it will save us a lot of trouble. I don’t attach any more meaning to the damned thing than you do. Everybody jeers at it to-day; I mean everybody with any knowledge of human beings, and uses it merely as a passport, and it happens to be a perfectly good passport. I’m one with you in making our own ceremony, the thing we shall live by, or try to live by, the thing that shall be at least a living force to us. Now take your own objections to marriage. You don’t have to be domestic for me. The boys run my house much better than you could. You don’t have to look after me when I am nervous—or seedy. I much prefer that you should not. I don’t ask you to change your ways and I don’t propose to change mine for you. And then—I’m not asking you to have children. I have always wanted kids, but somehow I have always cared for women who did not. I have to accept that ———”
“Oh, Dane, I cannot help it,” she broke in angrily. “Don’t you suppose that if I could be different I would? Do you think I’ve had an easy life trying to be myself? If I’m not to be myself what the devil am I to be? A shadow of my mother, my father, my sisters, my aunts? What? If I could be a nice plump purring bovine senti-
