ack excitably and made a violent
gesture with his cigarette. "They peer at the bride with their
haggard eyes, and they say, 'What! You have not seen your husband
till to-day! How strange--how strange! Has he not written to you?
Suppose you do not like him,' and they laugh and add, 'Fancy a girl
among us being married like that!'... The imbeciles--whose own
marriages are abominations!"

For a moment Arlee was silent, instinct and impulse warring within
her. The man was a maniac upon those subjects, and it was madness to
exchange a word with him--but her young anger darted through her
discretion.

"They are _not_ abominations!" she gave back proudly.

"But I know--I know--have I not been at marriages in England?" he
declared, with startling fierceness. "Men and women crowd about the
bride; they press in line and kiss her; bearded mouths and shaven
lips, young and old, they brush off that exquisite bloom of
innocence which a husband delights to discover. Her lips are soiled,
_fanee_.... And then the man and woman go away together into a
public hotel or a train, and the people laugh and shout after them,
and hurl shoes and rice, with a great din of noise. I have heard!"
He stopped, looked a moment at the flushed curve of Arlee's averted
face, the droop of her shadowy lashes which veiled the confusion and
anger of her spirit, and then, leaning forward, his eyes still upon
her, he spoke in a lower, softer tone, caressing in its inflections.

"With us it is not so," he said. "We have dignity in our rejoicing,
and delicacy in our love. The bride is brought in state to the home
of her husband, no eyes in the street resting upon her, and there,
in his home, her husband welcomes her and retires with his friends,
while she holds a reception with hers. Later the husband will come
home and greet her, and he wooes her to him as tenderly as he would
gather a flower that he would wear. He is no rude master, no tyrant,
as you have been taught to think! He wins her heart and mind to him;
it is the conquest of the spirit!... I tell you that our men alone
understand the secret of women! Is not the life he gives her better
than what you call the world? The woman blooms like a flower for her
husband alone; his eyes only may dwell upon the beauty of her face;
for him alone, her lips--her lips----"

The young man's voice, grown husky, died away. A dreadful stillness
followed, a stillness vibrating with unspoken thought. Her eyes
lifted t