y, are lunching together. They are old friends and have not met for
years._

_Margaret._ 'How nice it is to be together again, but I'm sorry to find
you so changed; you don't look happy, what is the trouble?'

_Katharine._ 'I ought to look happy, I've had wonderful luck, but the
truth is, I'm utterly tired. The conditions of marriage nowadays are
horribly wearing, don't you think?'

_M._ 'Well, of course, we miss that feeling of peace and security that
our mothers talked of, but then we also miss that ghastly monotony.
Think of living year after year, thirty, forty, fifty years, with the
same man! How tired one would get of his tempers.'

_K._ 'I'm not so sure of that. Monotony of tempers is better than
variety. All people have them, anyway. Besides, I've a notion that our
fathers were nothing like so difficult to live with as our husbands are.
You see, in the old days they knew they were fixed up for life, and that
acted as a curb. We seem to miss that curb nowadays.'

_M._ 'Yes, there's something in that. I remember my grandmother, who was
married at the end of the last century, used to say that her husband was
her Sheet Anchor, and he called her his Haven of Rest.'

_K._ 'Oh, I envy them! That's what I want so badly--a haven, an anchor!
How peaceful life must have been then before this horrible new system
came in.'

_M._ 'People evidently didn't seem to think so, or why should they have
altered it? But what's your quarrel with the system? You've had four
husbands and changed the first two almost as quickly as the law
allowed.'

_K._ 'Yes, and I'm only forty-one. I began too young--at eighteen--but
one naturally takes marriage lightly when one knows it's only for five
years. One enters upon it as thoughtlessly as our happy mothers used to
start their flirtations.'

_M._ 'The consequences are rather more serious though; we are
disillusioned women at the age when they were still light-hearted
girls.'

_K._ 'It's the families that make it so difficult. Fatherhood is quite a
cult nowadays. All my husbands have been of a philoprogenitive turn, and
I have eight children.'

_M._ 'Eight children! No wonder you look worried.'

_K._ 'Exactly! my mother would have been horrified. Two or three was the
correct number in her days, four at the utmost, and five a fatality and
very rare.'

_M._ 'Well, my dear, you needn't have had so many; you should have
curbed that cult of Fatherhood. No woman is compelled to bear c