sentiment." He drank, and callously blew smoke at Shelton. "Besides,
there are many people with religious views about it."

"It's always seemed to me," said Shelton, "to be quaint that people
should assert that marriage gives them the right to 'an eye for an eye,'
and call themselves Christians. Did you ever know anybody stand on their
rights except out of wounded pride or for the sake of their own comfort?
Let them call their reasons what they like, you know as well as I do
that it's cant."

"I don't know about that," said Halidome, more and more superior as
Shelton grew more warm; "when you stand on your rights, you do it for
the sake of Society as well as for your own. If you want to do away with
marriage, why don't you say so?"

"But I don't," said Shelton, "is it likely? Why, I'm going--" He
stopped without adding the words "to be married myself," for it suddenly
occurred to him that the reason was not the most lofty and philosophic
in the world. "All I can say is," he went on soberly, "that you can't
make a horse drink by driving him. Generosity is the surest way of
tightening the knot with people who've any sense of decency; as to the
rest, the chief thing is to prevent their breeding."

Halidome smiled.

"You're a rum chap," he said.

Shelton jerked his cigarette into the fire.

"I tell you what"--for late at night a certain power of vision came to