They are asked and answered every day of the world; perhaps not often so cruelly as here in this little cabin.
She began, weakly, to try to resign herself to some frame of mind by which she could entertain the bare, brutal thought of this alternative.
She had come more than a thousand miles to meet this man by plan, by arrangement.

Oh, no (so she argued), it could not be true that there was but one man for one woman, one woman for a man, in all the world.
Annie must have been right.

Propinquity did it--was that not why men and women nearly always married in their own village, their own social circle?
Well, then, here was propinquity.

Object, matrimony! Would propinquity solve all this at last, as though this were a desert island, they two alone remaining?
God! Was it indeed true, asked Mary Warren, in her bitter darkness, that the rude doctrine of material ideas alone must rule the world now in this strange, new, inchoate, revolutionary age?
Was it indeed true that sentiment, the emotions, the tenderer things of life, a woman's immeasurable inheritance--must all these things go also into the discards of the world's vast bloody bargain counter?
She remembered Annie's rude but well-meant words, back there where they once crudely struggled with these great questions.

"What's the use of trying to change the world, Sis ?" she had said.