"I wish to ask you how you mean to be married?"

He looked at her in surprise.

"But, like every one else!"

"Every one?" she asked, persistently.

"Is there any other way of being married?"

"Yes."

"I do not in the least understand this manner of asking conundrums; if
you are alluding to a fashionable custom of which I know nothing, say so
frankly. That will not wound me, since I am the first to declare that I
know nothing of it. What do you wish?"

She felt his irritation increase, and yet she could not decide to say
what she wished.

"I have begun badly," she said. "I should have told you at first that
you will always find in me a wife who will respect your ideas and
beliefs, who will never permit herself to judge you, and still less to
seek to contend with them or to modify them. That you feel, do you not,
is neither a part of my nature nor of my love?"

"Conclude!" he said impatiently.

"I think, then," she said with timid hesitation, "that you will not say