of--of making
a dash for freedom at some time or other. Women you wouldn't accuse of a
single rebellious thought all their born days. You'd say they were
crazy. Perhaps so, at the time. They get all on edge. Weak, weedy women
are different. They haven't the same call for freedom, somehow."

"What do you mean by this dash for freedom business?" I asked. Bill
looked at me solemnly.

"Marriage is a ring-fence round a pretty small patch, as a rule," she
observed. "A woman goes into it gladly. She feels young and weak and
ignorant, and when she's married she feels _safe_. But when she grows up
to her full stature of mind and body, and she's no longer weak and
ignorant, it's different. It's no longer safety first with her."

"But love ..." I began. She stopped me.

"Oh, love's got nothing at all to do with it, you sentimental old thing.
How old was Juliet--fourteen, wasn't she?" she asked suddenly, staring
out of the window. I nodded.

"Well, there you are!" She has many of her husband's expressions. "At
thirty-two, say, she would have been a fine, big, handsome woman,
knowing the world and alive all round. The chances are _she_ would have
had a storm, as you call it."

"If she'd married Romeo?" I asked.

"'T wouldn't matter who she'd married," she replied, rubbing her nose.
"You're thinking of love again, I'll be bound. I'm not talking about
love, my good man, I'm talking about life."

"Then you make no allowance for sentiment," I said.

"Oh don't I! I make any amount of allowance for sentiment. It's just
sentiment such women as we are talking about have to watch. That's what
you mean by love, I suppose. It is always prowling round the house,
trying to get in. As a rule, there's no chance, for married women are
too busy to be eternally thinking about love, though to read novels
you'd think they were."

"A married woman, according to you, is a highly complex organism," I
observed smiling.

"A married woman, according to me, is precisely what her husband has
made her," she retorted, and adding, "Think that over while you get on
with your work," she left the room.

But I continued to stare out of the window. Somehow I was stirred. There
seemed to me something ominous in my own preoccupation with these
affairs, affairs in which I could not, even had I the right, to meddle.
My friend's laconic exposition only deepened the dramatic quality of the
situation. For an author I had been singularly luckless in meeting dra