His intelligence might be twentieth
century or beyond. It might acquiesce in, or even enthusiastically
advocate, a relation between men and women that hadn't existed, anyway
since the beginning of the Christian Era; it might accept without
faltering, all the corollaries pendent to that relation. But his
actuating instincts, his psychical reflexes, stretched their roots away
back to the Middle Ages. Under the dominance of those instincts, a man
lost caste--became an object of contemptuous derision, if he couldn't
keep his wife. It was bad enough to have another man take her away from
him, but it was worse to have her go away in the absence of such an
excuse; worst of all, to have her go away to seek a job and earn her own
living.
Rose didn't know how long the secret could be kept. Wherever she went,
whatever she did, there'd always be the risk that some one who could
carry back the news to Rodney's friends, would recognize her. It was a
risk that had to be taken, and she didn't intend to allow herself to be
paralyzed by a perpetual dread of what might at any time happen.
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