aused are now multiplied a thousand times. Infidelity may be
less frequent, but if people have the wish and the opportunity for it
they're not likely to wait for a certain number of years, until it
ceases to be technically a sin. The same with the other evils. There
will always be a large number of men who postpone marriage for financial
or other reasons, and a large number of women who can only earn a living
in one way--the oldest profession in the world will always be kept
going! Seduction, too, is not likely to cease as long as the law is so
lenient to it. There will always be ignorant, silly, unprotected girls
and always men to take advantage of them.'

_M._ 'There seem to be just as many elderly spinsters, too, as before;
the women who don't attract men remain the same under any system, and
often they are the best women.'

_K._ 'How strange it must be _never to have had a husband!_'

_M._ 'It must be peaceful, at anyrate; but spinsters don't look any
happier than married women.'

_K._ 'I can only see one good result of the leasehold system--that women
are as anxious for motherhood now as in the early century they were
anxious to avoid it. We grow old with the fear of almost certain
desertion and loneliness before us, and the one hope for our old age is
our children----Oh! I am sorry, I forgot you had none.'

_M._ 'Never mind, I often think of it, and whenever Jack admires or pays
attention to another woman, I am in terror for fear he has found a fresh
attraction and may want to leave me. What stuff they used to write
formerly about the necessity for love being free. As if freedom were
such a glorious thing! Why, we are all slaves to some convention or
passion or theory; none of us are free, really free, and we wouldn't
like it if we were. It may be all very well for the fantastic love of
novels to be free, but that strange _need of each other_, which we call
"love" in real life, for want of a better term--_that_ must be forged
into a bond, or what help is it to us poor vacillating mortals? Love
must be an Anchor in real life--nothing else is any use!'

III

THE FIASCO OF FREE LOVE

'The ultimate standards by which all men judge of behaviour is the
resulting happiness or misery.'

'Conduct whose total results, immediate and remote, are injurious
is bad conduct.' --HERBERT SPENCER.

Free love has been called the most dangerous and delusive of all
marriage schemes. It is based on a whol