“But would you really marry a girl ...?” began Lewisham, with an unprecedented admiration for Dunkerley in his eyes.

“Why not?”

“On—?” Lewisham hesitated.

“Forty pounds a year res.  Whack!  Yes.”

A silent youngster began to speak, cleared an accumulated huskiness from his throat and said, “Consider the girl.”

“Why marry?” asked Bletherley, unregarded.

“You must admit you are asking a great thing when you want a girl ...” began Parkson.

“Not so.  When a girl’s chosen a man, and he chooses her, her place is with him.  What is the good of hankering?  Mutual.  Fight together.”

“Good!” said Lewisham, suddenly emotional.  “You talk like a man, Dunkerley.  I’m hanged if you don’t.”

“The place of Woman,” insisted Parkson, “is the Home.  And if there is no home—!  I hold that, if need be, a man should toil seven years—­as Jacob did for Rachel—­ruling his passions, to make the home fitting and sweet for her ...”

“Get the hutch for the pet animal,” said Dunkerley.  “No.  I mean to marry a woman.  Female sex always has been in the struggle for existence—­no great damage so far—­always will be.  Tremendous idea—­that struggle for existence.  Only sensible theory you’ve got hold of, Lewisham.  Woman who isn’t fighting square side by side with a man—­woman who’s just kept and fed and petted is ...”  He hesitated.

A lad with a spotted face and a bulldog pipe between his teeth supplied a Biblical word.

“That’s shag,” said Dunkerley, “I was going to say ‘a harem of one’”

The youngster was puzzled for a moment.  “I smoke Perique,” he said.

“It will make you just as sick,” said Dunkerley.

“Refinement’s so beastly vulgar,” was the belated answer of the smoker of Perique.

That was the interesting part of the evening to Lewisham.  Parkson suddenly rose, got down “Sesame and Lilies,” and insisted upon reading a lengthy mellifluous extract that went like a garden roller over the debate, and afterwards Bletherley became the centre of a wrangle that left him grossly insulted and in a minority of one.  The institution of marriage, so far as the South Kensington student is concerned, is in no immediate danger.

Parkson turned out with the rest of them at half-past ten, for a walk.  The night was warm for February and the waxing moon bright.  Parkson fixed himself upon Lewisham and Dunkerley, to Lewisham’s intense annoyance—­for he had a few intimate things he could have said to the man of Ideas that night.  Dunkerley lived north, so that the three went up Exhibition Road to High Street, Kensington.  There they parted from Dunkerley, and Lewisham and Parkson turned southward again for Lewisham’s new lodging in Chelsea.

Parkson was one of those exponents of virtue for whom the discussion of sexual matters has an irresistible attraction.  The meeting had left him eloquent.  He had argued with Dunkerley to the verge of indelicacy, and now he poured out a vast and increasingly confidential flow of talk upon Lewisham.  Lewisham was distraught.  He walked as fast as he could.  His sole object was to get rid of Parkson.  Parkson’s sole object was to tell him interesting secrets, about himself and a Certain Person with a mind of extraordinary Purity of whom Lewisham had heard before.