" She leaned far back in the chair, her eyes half shut.
"Don't you think--as a woman, not as a theorist--that Mrs. Anson might at
least have come to him when he was dying?"
"It would only have been uncomfortable for her. She had no part in his
life; she could not feel with him. She could do nothing."
"But suppose she had loved him? By that memory, then, of the time when
they took each other for better or for worse, until death should part
them?"
"Death did part them when the code banished him; when he passed from a
free world into a cage. Besides, we are talking about people marrying,
not about their loving."
"I will admit," I said, with a little raw irony, "that I was not exact in
definition."
Here I got a glimpse into her nature which rendered after events not so
marvellous to me as they might seem to others. She thought a moment quite
indolently, and then continued: "You make one moralise like George Eliot.
Marriage is a condition, but love must be an action. The one is a
contract, the other is complete possession, a principle--that is, if it
exists at all. I do not know."
She turned the rings round mechanically on her finger; and among them was
a wedding-ring! Her voice had become low and abstracted, and now she
seemed to have forgotten my presence, and was looking out upon the
humming darkness round us, through which now and again there rang a
boatswain's whistle, or the loud laugh of Blackburn, telling of a joyous
hour in the smoking-room.
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