“Love is our faith”

“Love is our faith” is Mrs. Hilbery’s formulation of love as a sustaining belief rather than a guarantee of certainty. Spoken as she recalls a night voyage with her husband, the phrase becomes a quiet counterweight to Katharine’s fear that romantic feeling may prove illusory and make marriage impossible.

The phrase in Mrs. Hilbery’s memory

Mrs. Hilbery introduces the words through a remembered boat journey toward a ship at night. The sun has set, the moon is rising, and three green lights shine on the steamer; her husband’s head appears grand against its mast. She remembers the scene as at once life and death, a voyage extending “for ever and ever.” The phrase emerges from this maritime recollection, where love is figured not as a settled destination but as faith carried through an immense and uncertain passage.

Her language makes the remembered lights and the surrounding sea part of the phrase’s meaning. Love is the belief that persists when the travelers do not know where they are bound, why they have been sent, or what they will find. Katharine receives the reverie as an ancient, harmonious story: the images of the steamer, water, and voyage give emotional shape to a confidence that is difficult to state as an argument.

Advice to Katharine

The phrase acquires an immediate purpose when Mrs. Hilbery turns from memory to her daughter’s present trouble. Katharine has described how love can seem to end suddenly, fade, or reveal itself as something imagined. She fears that lovers may repeatedly mistake illusion for feeling, become uncertain of one another, and suffer through abrupt changes from happiness to misery. That instability, she says, makes marriage impossible, even as she cannot imagine living without Ralph.

Mrs. Hilbery answers that they must have faith in their vision. She does not deny the possibility of disillusionment: she says earnestly that the same difficulty belongs to everyone, including herself and Katharine’s father. The phrase therefore offers neither proof that love will remain unchanged nor a solution to the practical question of marriage. It asks Katharine to trust the reality of a vision despite the risk that feeling may alter.

Meaning and contrast

The expression joins the private memory of a marriage to the uncertainty of Katharine’s relationship with Ralph, but it does not erase the difference between their situations. Mrs. Hilbery recalls a love she already understands through a shared past; Katharine is trying to make a decision amid doubt about what love means in the present. The older woman’s remembered voyage gives her counsel emotional force, while Katharine’s hesitation keeps that counsel from becoming a simple resolution.

The phrase’s significance lies in this tension between faith and certainty. “Love is our faith” names a way of enduring what cannot be conclusively known: where a relationship is going, whether feeling will hold, or what the future will bring. In the scene, it is a sustaining invitation, not a promise that love abolishes change.