Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/227

Rh of your manhood to make this hard thing easy for us to bear."

"I don't want to make it easy. I want to make it impossible. You are building a fetish out of a chimera, Jennifer. We owe nothing to the past, nor to the future. We owe all to ourselves only. And I am not going to spoil your life and mine for the sake of a creation of the fancy. This life is all we have, and it is madness not to make the most of it. It is madness to lose a day—an hour"

He caught her hands, speaking thickly, and his face was lit and warm with eagerness. She met his eyes steadily.

"Does love not mean respect with you?" she asked.

The phrase struck him. He remembered that German boy at Grey Wolf who had desired to "love all ladies always." And he remembered his own rebuke. It was her face had brought it from him then. It was her face brought its memory now. He let her hands go and stood up.

"I beg your pardon if I have offended you," he said. "But all this is only fencing, you know. You will have to see the thing in a wider light. It is impossible that you should seriously think of condemning us to such an equivocal position"

Through the dark of the hot room he walked back and forth; he stood still; he came back to the window again: arguing ever with patience, with passion, with flashes of sarcasm or tenderness. His bitter humour got the upper hand at last.

"Your religion is accountable for this, of course. You have run after it until it has turned and rent you as all extremes are certain to do. But in your natural pleasure at self-sacrifice you appear to have forgotten me. I have not offered myself up for demolition, and I can't see what right you have to hand it out to me."

"It isn't religion. It is—conscience."

"The same thing when they become abnormal."

"No. Conscience is it is God, I suppose. Religion—well, it is tied on to us with our bibs, and we leave it there because it becomes a habit. And with lots of people it is nothing more. God is more than that, you know. He is sought first-hand by those who won't take a go-between. Religion is often just the go-between. And when you sneer