s.

He heard her with his lips pressing tighter and tighter together until
they were yellow white and creased with a hundred wicked little
horizontal creases. Then he interrupted her with silent gesticulations.
Then words came.

"I never did, Elly," he said. "I never did. Reely--there are times when
you ain't rational. Married couples who're assistants in shops and
places!"

For a little while he sought some adequate expression of his point of
view.

"Nice thing to go keeping a place for these chaps to have their cheap
bits of skirt in," he said at last.

Then further: "If a man wants a girl let him work himself up until he
can keep her. Married couples indeed!"

He began to expand the possibilities of the case with a quite unusual
vividness. "Double beds in each cubicle, I suppose," he said, and played
for a time about this fancy.... "Well, to hear such an idea from you of
all people, Elly. I never did."

He couldn't leave it alone. He had to go on to the bitter end with the
vision she had evoked in his mind. He was jealous, passionately jealous,
it was only too manifest, of the possible happinesses of these young
people. He was possessed by that instinctive hatred for the realized
love of others which lies at the base of so much of our moral
legislation. The bare thought--whole corridors of bridal chambers!--made
his face white and his hand quiver. _His_ young men and young women! The
fires of a hundred Vigilance Committees blazed suddenly in his reddened
eyes. He might have been a concentrated society for preventing the rapid
multiplication of the unfit. The idea of facilitating early marriages
was manifestly shameful to him, a disgraceful service to render, a job
for Pandarus. What was she thinking of? Elly of all people! Elly who had
been as innocent as driven snow before Georgina came interfering!

It ended in a fit of abuse and a panting seizure, and for a day or so he
was too ill to resume the discussion, to do more than indicate a
disgusted aloofness....

And then it may be the obscure chemicals at work within him changed
their phase of reaction. At any rate he mended, became gentler, was more
loving to his wife than he had been for some time and astonished her by
saying that if she wanted Hostels for married couples, it wasn't perhaps
so entirely unreasonable. Selected cases, he stipulated, it would have
to be and above a certain age limit, sober people. "It might even be a
check on immorality," he