anyhow, a point of view, and has its
own merits. But your minds seem to me to be in a hopeless muddle. You
think you're going forward while you're really going back."

"Marriage," said Gerda, "is so Victorian. It's like antimacassars."

"Now, my dear, do you mean _anything_ by either of those statements?
Marriage wasn't invented in Victoria's reign. Nor did it occur more
frequently in that reign than it had before or does now. Why Victorian,
then? And why antimacassars? Think it out. How _can_ a legal contract be
like a doyley on the back of a chair? Where is the resemblance? It sounds
like a riddle, only there's no answer. No, you know you've got no answer.
That kind of remark is sheer sentimentality and muddle-headedness. Why
are people in their twenties so often sentimental? That's another
riddle."

"That's what Nan says. She told me once that she used to be sentimental
when she was twenty. Was she?"

"More than she is now, anyhow."

Neville's voice was a little curt. She was not happy about Nan, who had
just gone to Rome for the winter.

"Well," Gerda said, "anyhow I'm not sentimental about not meaning to
marry. I've thought about it for years, and I know."

"Thought about it! Much you know about it." Neville, tired and cross
from over-work, was, unlike herself, playing the traditional conventional
mother. "Have you thought how it will affect your children, for
instance?"

Those perpetual, tiresome children. Gerda was sick of them.

"Oh yes, I've thought a lot about that. And I can't see it will hurt
them. Barry and I talked for ever so long about the children. So did
father."

So did Neville.

"Of course I know," she said, "that you and Kay would be only too pleased
if father and I had never been married, but you've no right to judge by
yourself the ones you and Barry may have. They may not be nearly so
odd.... And then there's your own personal position. The world's full of
people who think they can insult a man's mistress."

"I don't meet people like that. The people I know don't insult other
people for not being married. They think it's quite natural, and only the
people's own business."

"You've moved in a small and rarefied clique so far, my dear. You'll meet
the other kind of people presently; one can't avoid them, the world's so
full of them."

"Do they matter?"

"Of course they matter. As mosquitoes matter, and wasps, and cars that
splash mud at you in the road. You'd be constantly anno