"But I was married to my guardian," I said. "Actually married. The clerk of the court had issued the license which was a legal permit for us to marry, and the minister pronounced us man and wife according to the solemn rites of the church. My guardian took an obligation to love, cherish and protect and I, an obligation to love, honor and obey; and then the minister invoked the blessing of heaven upon our union and pronounced the solemn warning to all who might object: 'Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.' Yes, I was actually married to Richard Sage, according to law and the sacred rites of the church."
"The more you explain, my dear Nequa, the more incomprehensible your ideas of marriage become. You say that you were actually married to Richard Sage. That God joined you together, but before He could do so, a permit had to be granted by the clerk of the court. Yet, in your own soul you repudiated this fraudulent marriage, and for nearly fifteen years you searched for your betrothed husband, to whom you felt bound by the laws which God had implanted in your own soul. To me it seems that this first engagement to Raphael Ganoe was the only true marriage, in which God had joined you together and that the court and the minister united to put you asunder. Your own inner consciousness, the spark of divinity that is in you, forced you to take this view of the transaction. From all the facts, just as you relate them, I must still insist that you were not married to Richard Sage. That the ceremony was a fraud and could not annul your obligations to Raphael Ganoe. Your actions demonstrate, that your own true self, took the same view of the matter, and that when you found your betrothed husband you loyally stood by his side in the hazardous effort to reach the pole, and now you are here with him in this inner world where we regard it as our first duty to accept the true and discard the false in all of our relations to each other, and to the universal system of which we form a part."
"I agree with you," I replied, "that my marriage to Richard Sage was false, and that in order to be true to myself and my higher convictions of duty to my absent lover, when I learned that he was still living, I was forced to rend these legal bonds regardless of the consequences; but still, in the eyes of the law, of society and the church, I was the wife of my guardian, the uncle of Raphael Ganoe, and hence his aunt, and as such could never become his wife. Yet I realized that I was united to Raphael in bonds of affection that never could and never should be broken. But all the powers of law, religion, and society were united to hold me to a union secured by deception, which I loathed and abhorred. It was the environments established by this world wide power that held me incarcerated, as it were, in a prison, from which there was no escape but the grave."