‘All the same, Lord help the man you marry,’ Chalks continued gloomily.

‘Oh, I shall never marry,’ Nina cried.  ’Because, first, I don’t approve of matrimony as an institution.  And then—­as you say—­Lord help my husband.  I should be such an uncomfortable wife.  So capricious, and flighty, and tantalising, and unsettling, and disobedient, and exacting, and everything.  Oh, but a horrid wife!  No, I shall never marry.  Marriage is quite too out-of-date.  I shan’t marry; but, if I ever meet a man and love him—­ah!’ She placed two fingers upon her lips, and kissed them, and waved the kiss to the skies.

This fragment of conversation passed in the Luxembourg Garden; and the three or four of us by whom she was accompanied glared threateningly at our mental image of that not-impossible upstart whom she might some day meet and love.  We were sure, of course, that he would be a beast; we hated him not merely because he would have cut us out with her, but because he would be so distinctly our inferior, so hopelessly unworthy of her, so helplessly incapable of appreciating her.  I think we conceived of him as tall, with drooping fair moustaches, and contemptibly meticulous in his dress.  He would probably not be of the Quarter; he would sneer at us.

’He’ll not understand her, he’ll not respect her.  Take her peculiar views.  We know where she gets them.  But he—­he’ll despise her for them, at the very time he’s profiting by ’em,’ some one said.

Her peculiar views of the institution of matrimony, the speaker meant.  She had got them from her father.  ’The relations of the sexes should be as free as friendship,’ he had taught.  ’If a man and a woman love each other, it is nobody’s business but their own.  Neither the Law nor Society can, with any show of justice, interfere.  That they do interfere, is a survival of feudalism, a survival of the system under which the individual, the subject, had no liberty, no rights.  If a man and a woman love each other, they should be as free to determine for themselves the character, extent, and duration of their intercourse, as two friends should be.  If they wish to live together under the same roof, let them.  If they wish to retain their separate domiciles, let them.  If they wish to cleave to each other till death severs them—­if they wish to part on the morrow of their union—­let them, by heaven.  But the couple who go before a priest or a magistrate, and bind themselves in ceremonial marriage, are serving to perpetuate tyranny, are insulting the dignity of human nature.’  Such was the gospel which Nina had absorbed (don’t, for goodness’ sake, imagine that I approve of it because I cite it), and which she professed in entire good faith.  We felt that the coming man would misapprehend both it and her—­though he would not hesitate to make a convenience of it.  Ugh, the cynic!