hearing].

Ann, musing on Violet's opportune advice, approaches Tanner; examines
him humorously for a moment from toe to top; and finally delivers her
opinion.

ANN. Violet is quite right. You ought to get married.

TANNER. [explosively] Ann: I will not marry you. Do you hear? I won't,
won't, won't, won't, WON'T marry you.

ANN. [placidly] Well, nobody axd you, sir she said, sir she said, sir
she said. So that's settled.

TANNER. Yes, nobody has asked me; but everybody treats the thing as
settled. It's in the air. When we meet, the others go away on absurd
pretexts to leave us alone together. Ramsden no longer scowls at me: his
eye beams, as if he were already giving you away to me in church. Tavy
refers me to your mother and gives me his blessing. Straker openly
treats you as his future employer: it was he who first told me of it.

ANN. Was that why you ran away?

TANNER. Yes, only to be stopped by a lovesick brigand and run down like
a truant schoolboy.

ANN. Well, if you don't want to be married, you needn't be [she turns
away from him and sits down, much at her ease].

TANNER. [following her] Does any man want to be hanged? Yet men let
themselves be hanged without a struggle for life, though they could at
least give the chaplain a black eye. We do the world's will, not our
own. I have a frightful feeling that I shall let myself be married
because it is the world's will that you should have a husband.

ANN. I daresay I shall, someday.

TANNER. But why me--me of all men? Marriage is to me apostasy,
profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood,
sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation,
acceptance of defeat. I shall decay like a thing that has served its
purpose and is done with; I shall change from a man with a future to
a man with a past; I shall see in the greasy eyes of all the other
husbands their relief at the arrival of a new prisoner to share their
ignominy. The young men will scorn me as one who has sold out: to the
young women I, who have always been an enigma and a possibility,
shall be merely somebody else's property--and damaged goods at that: a
secondhand man at best.

ANN. Well, your wife can put on a cap and make herself ugly to keep you
in countenance, like my grandmother.

TANNER. So that she may make her triumph more insolent by publicly
throwing away the bait the moment the trap snaps on the victim!

ANN. After all, though, what differ