ould like to
have it."

"But that's what you and I are doing," I insisted.

"We think we're doing it--or rather you think so," she replied. "And
sometimes, I admit that you almost persuade me to think so. Never quite.
What disturbs me," she continued, "is to find you and the poets founding
your new freedom on new justifications, discarding the old law only to
make a new one,--as though we could ever get away from necessities,
escape from disagreeable things, except in dreams. And then, this
delusion of believing that we are masters of our own destiny--" She
paused and pressed my fingers.

"There you go-back to predestination!" I exclaimed.

"I don't go back to anything, or forward to anything," she exclaimed.
"Women are elemental, but I don't expect you to understand it. Laws and
codes are foreign to us, philosophies and dreams may dazzle us for the
moment, but what we feel underneath and what we yield to are the primal
forces, the great necessities; when we refuse joys it's because we know
these forces by a sort of instinct, when we're overcome it's with a full
knowledge that there's a price. You've talked a great deal, Hugh, about
carving out our future. I listened to you, but I resisted you. It wasn't
the morality that was taught me as a child that made me resist, it was
something deeper than that, more fundamental, something I feel but can't
yet perceive, and yet shall perceive some day. It isn't that I'm clinging
to the hard and fast rules because I fail to see any others, it isn't
that I believe that all people should stick together whether they are
happily married or not, but--I must say it even now--I have a feeling I
can't define that divorce isn't for us. I'm not talking about right and
wrong in the ordinary sense--it's just what I feel. I've ceased to
think."

"Nancy!" I reproached her.

"I can't help it--I don't want to be morbid. Do you remember my asking
you about God?--the first day this began? and whether you had a god?
Well, that's the trouble with us all to-day, we haven't any God, we're
wanderers, drifters. And now it's just life that's got hold of us, my
dear, and swept us away together. That's our justification--if we needed
one--it's been too strong for us." She leaned back against the tree and
closed her eyes. "We're like chips in the torrent of it, Hugh."....

It was not until the shadow of the forest had crept far across the lake
and the darkening waters were still that we rose reluctant