Torrie would have to marry him.
Up to that time, indeed, he had given scant thought to marriage, as marriage. He had been played on but lightly by the social forces about him, and the established covenant of mating seemed to him as essentially a social ceremony. Yet in his case, he felt, it was something distinctly more than a movement to legalize the illicit. He nursed a natural enough desire to be honest and aboveboard in his human relationships. But there was a more personal aspect of the situation. He was already in a position from which he could not extricate himself, a position in which he found no wish to extricate himself. Retreat, under the circumstances, was impossible. And since he could not go back, since what had been done had been done, he must now push through to the end of the tunnel. What he had taken must be made entirely and unquestioningly his own. It would surely be a clarifying of the situation, he felt, that establishment of proprietorship. It would bring things down to earth. It would materialize what otherwise might stand over-romantic and over-exacting. It would do away with those too disturbing accidental meetings which were remembered now as storms and tempests are apt to be remembered. Meetings such as those, he felt, would in some way lead to tragedy.
They would have to marry, if only to save themselves. The wild bird would become a tame one, but the music of life would be forever at his elbow, would be tied to him, would become a part of him. He felt the need of superseding all other claimants to Torrie's time and attention. She had spelled, and still spelled, wonder and rapture to him. And he was still youthful enough to demand that this same wonder and rapture of the passing moment should be made absolute as well as permanent. It was a strange situation, he acknowledged. It loomed before him as something almost too disturbingly new to be intimately inspected. Yet it was merely the ancient
