alistic of marriages, must blunt the edges
to a certain extent," said Judy. "You may call it growing into a saner,
more wholesome, view of life, or you may call it a blunting of the
edges--the fact is the same. Marriage is a terribly clumsy institution,
but it's the most possible way this old world has evolved. It always
comes back to it after brave but fated sallies into other paths."

"Such as yours?" asked Ishmael. It was impossible to pretend to fence
with honesty such as hers.

"No, not such as mine, because I cannot say I did it for any exalted
reason, such as wishing to reform the world. I had no splendid ideas on
mutual freedom or anything like that. I did it simply because I loved
Joe and it was the only way I could have him without making him tired of
me and unhappy. It had to be secret, not only because the sordidness of
wagging tongues would have spoilt it so, but because my life would have
been so unbearable in the world. A woman's sin is always blamed so
heavily. That's a commonplace, isn't it? Yet a woman's sin should be the
more forgivable. She sins because it is _the_ man; he sins because it is
_a_ woman."

"Sin!" said Ishmael. "Don't you get to that point in life when the word
'sin' becomes extraordinarily meaningless, like the word 'time' in that
chapter of Ecclesiastes where it occurs so often that when one comes to
the end of the chapter 't-i-m-e' means nothing to one. Sin seems to come
so often in life it grows meaningless too."

"Sin, technically speaking, does, to all but the theologian; but playing
the game, doing the decent thing, not only to others, but to oneself,
and keeping one's spiritual taste unspoiled, these things remain, and
they really mean the same."

"I suppose they do. I like talking to you, Judy. It's not like talking
to a woman, although one's conscious all the time that you are very much
of a woman. But you seem to meet one on common ground."

"There's not so much difference between men and women as people are apt
to think. People are always saying 'men are more this and women are more
that' when really it's the case of the individual, irrespective of sex.
A favourite cry is that men are more selfish. I really rather doubt it.
Perhaps, if one must generalise, men are more selfish and women are more
egotistical, and of the two the former is the easier vice to overcome.
But all this talk of men and women, women and men, seems to me like
something I was in the middle of year