"Marriage is so absurd!" and immediately it occurred to her that she might have put this more effectively.

"Cela n'est pas bien dit!" she thought.
"Let us sit down together and talk about it," he answered gently, and drew her toward the little sofa in the corner.
"But--I am afraid--there is nothing more to say.

And in a quarter of an hour I must go." Cardiff smiled masterfully.

"I could marry you, little one, in a quarter of an hour," he said.
But at the end of that time Lawrence Cardiff found himself very far indeed from the altar, and more enlightened perhaps than he had ever been before about the radicalism of certain modern sentiments concerning it.

She would change, he averred; might he be allowed to hope that she would change, and to wait--months, years?
She would never change, Elfrida avowed, it was useless--quite useless--to think of that.