nner of speech until now
foreign to her.

"What is marriage, John Cowles?" she asked of me, abruptly, with no
preface.

"It is the Plan," I answered, apathetically. She pondered for a time.

"Are we, then, only creatures, puppets, toys?"

"Yes," I said to her. "A man is a toy. Love was born before man was
created, before animals or plants. Atom, ran to atom, seeking. It was
love." She pondered yet a while.

"And what is it, then, John Cowles, that women call 'wrong'?"

"Very often what is right," I said to her, apathetically. "When two love
the crime is that they shall not wed. When they do not love, the crime
is when they do wed."

"But without marriage," she hesitated, "the home--"

"It is the old question," I said. "The home is built on woman's virtue;
but virtue is not the same where there is no tome, no property, where
there is no society--it is an artificial thing, born of compromise, and
grown stronger by custom of the ages of property-owning man."

I saw a horror come across her eyes.

"What do you say to me, John Cowles? That what a woman prizes is not
right, is not good? No, that I shall _not_ think!" She drew apart from
me.

"Because you think just as you do, I love you," I said.

"Yet you say so many things. I have taken life as it came, just as other
girls do, not thinking. It is not nice, it is not _clean_, that girls
should study over these things. That is not right."

"No, that is not right," said I, dully.

"Then tell me, what is marriage--that one thing a girl dreams of all her
life. Is it of the church?"

"It is not of the church," I said.

"Then it is the law."

"It is not the law," I said.

"Then what is it?" she asked. "John Cowles, tell me, what makes a
wedding between two who really and truly love. Can marriage be of but
two?"

"Yes," said I.

"But there must be witnesses--there must be ceremony--else there is no
marriage," she went on. Her woman's brain clung to the safe, sane groove
which alone can guide progress and civilization and society--that great,
cruel, kind, imperative compromise of marriage, without which all the
advancement of the world would be as naught. I loved her for it. But for
me, I say I had gone savage. I was at the beginning of all this, whereas
it remained with her as she had left it.

"Witnesses?" I said. "Look at those!" I pointed to the mountains.
"Marriages, many of them, have been made with no better witnesses than
those."

My heart stop