“They don’t influence me the least little bit.  I’d like to see them try.  They’re much too clever.  They know I’d be off like a shot if they did.  Why, they let me do every mortal thing I please—­turn the schoolroom into a meeting hall for your friends to play the devil in.  That Blackadder girl was yelling the house down, yet they didn’t say anything.  And your people aren’t as bad as you make out, you know.  You couldn’t live on your own if your father didn’t give you an allowance.  I like Mrs. Jervis.”

“Because she likes you.”

“Well, that’s a reason.  It isn’t the reason why I like my own mother, because she doesn’t like me so very much.  That’s why she lets me do what I like.  She doesn’t care enough to stop me.  She only really cares for Dad and John and Nicky and Michael.”

Rosalind looked fierce and stubborn.

“That’s what’s the matter with all of you,” she said.

“What is?”

“Caring like that.  It’s all sex.  Sex instinct, sex feeling.  Maud’s right.  It’s what we’re up against all the time.”

Dorothy said to herself, “That’s what’s the matter with Rosalind, if she only knew it.”

Rosalind loved Michael and Michael detested her, and Nicky didn’t like her very much.  She always looked fierce and stubborn when she heard Michael’s name.

Rosalind went on.  “When it comes to sex you don’t revolt.  You sit down.”

“I do revolt.  I’m revolting now.  I go much farther than you do.  I think the marriage laws are rotten; I think divorce ought to be for incompatibility.  I think love isn’t love and can’t last unless it’s free.  I think marriage ought to be abolished—­not yet, perhaps, but when we’ve become civilized.  It will be.  It’s bound to be.  As it is, I think every woman has a right to have a baby if she wants one.  If Emmeline had had a baby, she wouldn’t be devastating us now.”

“That’s what you think, but it isn’t what you feel.  It’s all thinking with you, Dorothy.  The revolt goes on in your brain.  You’ll never do anything.  It isn’t that you haven’t the courage to go against your men.  You haven’t the will.  You don’t want to.”

“Why should I?  What do they do?  Father and Michael and Nicky don’t interfere with me any more than Mother does.”

“You know I’m not thinking of them.  They don’t really matter.”

“Who are you thinking of then?  Frank Drayton?  You needn’t!”

It was mean of Rosalind to hit below the belt like that, when she knew that she was safe.  Michael had never been brought against her and never would be.  It was disgusting of her to imply that Dorothy’s state of mind was palpable, when her own (though sufficiently advertised by her behaviour) had received from Michael’s sister the consecration of silence as a secret, tragic thing.

They had reached the tram-lines.

At the sight of the Charing Cross `bus Rosalind assumed an air of rollicking, adventurous travel.