Page:Neith Boyce--The bond.djvu/209

Rh social relations help the original relation—they're in the line of its natural growth."

"You want to take all you can get out of society, then, and not give in return?"

"I do give—I give children, for example. But my private affairs are no concern of society's. Conventions are only made to be broken. Why shouldn't I have my own way of breaking them?"

"If you hadn't this particular convention, then, you admit you'd be more a social being." "Yes, but I shouldn't be so happy."

"You risk being very unhappy sometime. That's what it is to put too much stress on one special relation."

Teresa shrugged her shoulders.

"If Allah wills it," she said, and her brilliant eyes seemed gaily to defy fate.