took advantage of this to extricate myself from the awkward position in
which she had put me--I took my hand from her shoulder.

"I am going to leave you," she announced.

"You forget that you are my wife," said I.

"I am not your wife," was her answer, and if she had not looked so
childlike, there in the moonlight all in white, I could not have held
myself in check, so insolent was the tone and so helpless of ever being
able to win her did she make me feel.

"You are my wife and you will stay here with me," I reiterated, my brain on
fire.

"I am my own, and I shall go where I please, and do what I please," was her
contemptuous retort. "Why won't you be reasonable? Why won't you see how
utterly unsuited we are? I don't ask you to be a gentleman--but just a man,
and be ashamed even to wish to detain a woman against her will."

I drew up a chair so close to her that to retreat, she was forced to sit
in the broad window-seat. Then I seated myself. "By all means, let us be
reasonable," said I. "Now, let me explain my position. I have heard you and
your friends discussing the views of marriage you've just been expressing.
Their views may be right, may be more civilized, more 'advanced' than mine.
No matter. They are not mine. I hold by the old standards--and you are
my wife--mine. Do you understand?" All this as tranquilly as if we were
discussing fair weather. "And you will live up to the obligation which the
marriage service has put upon you."

She might have been a marble statue pedestaled in that window seat.

"You married me of your own free will--for you could have protested to
the preacher and he would have sustained you. You tacitly put certain
conditions on our marriage. I assented to them. I have respected them.
I shall continue to respect them. But--when you married me, you didn't
marry a dawdling dude chattering 'advanced ideas' with his head full of
libertinism. You married a man. And that man is your husband."

I waited, but she made no comment--not even by gesture or movement. She
simply sat, her hands interlaced in her lap, her eyes straight upon mine.

"You say let us be reasonable," I went on. "Well, let us be reasonable.
There may come a time when woman can be free and independent, but that time
is a long way off yet. The world is organized on the basis of every woman's
having a protector--of every decent woman's having a husband, unless she
remains in the home of some of her blood-relations. The