“Because I believe in permanent unions, as a general principle.  They’re more civilised.  It’s unusual, uncivic, dotting about from one mate to another, leaving your young and forgetting all about them and having new ones.  Irresponsible, I call it.  Living only for a good time.  It’s not the way to be good citizens, as I see it, nor to bring up good citizens....  Oh, I know that the whole question of sex relationships is horribly complicated, and can’t be settled with a phrase or a dogma.  It’s been for centuries so wrapped in cant and humbug and expediencies and camouflage; I don’t profess to be able to pierce through all that, or to so much as begin to think it out clearly.  The only thing I can fall back on as a certainty is the children question.  A confused and impermanent family life must be a bad background for the young.  They want all they can get of both their parents, in the way of education and training and love.”

“Family life is such a hopeless muddle, anyhow.”

“A muddle, yes.  Hopeless, no.  Look at your own.  Your father and mother have always been friends with each other and with you.  They brought you up with definite ideas about what they wanted you to become—­fairly well thought-out and consistent ideas, I suppose.  I don’t say they could do much—­parents never can—­but something soaks in.”

“Usually something silly and bad.”

“Often, yes.  Anyhow a queer kind of mixed brew.  But at least the parents have their chance.  It’s what they’re there for; they’ve got to do all they know, while the children are young, to influence them towards what they personally believe, however mistakenly, to be the finest points of view.  Of course lots of it is, as you say, silly and bad, because people are largely silly and bad.  But no parent can be absolved from doing his or her best.”

Barry was walking round the conservatory, eager and full of faith and hope and fire, talking rapidly, the educational enthusiast, the ardent citizen, the social being, the institutionalist, all over.  He was all these things; he was rooted and grounded in citizenship, in social ethics.  He stopped by the couch and stood looking down at Gerda among her fruit, his hands in his pockets, his eyes bright and lit.

“All the same, darling, I shall never want to fetter you.  If you ever want to leave me, I shan’t come after you.  The legal tie shan’t stand in your way.  And to me it would make no difference; I shouldn’t leave you in any case, married or not.  So I don’t see how or why you score in doing without the contract.”

“It’s the idea of the thing, partly.  I don’t want to wear a wedding ring and be Mrs. Briscoe.  I want to be Gerda Bendish, living with Barry Briscoe because we like to....  I expect, Barry, in my case it would be for always, because, at present, I can’t imagine stopping caring more for you than for anything else.  But that doesn’t affect the principle of the thing.  It would be wrong for me to marry you.  One oughtn’t to give up one’s principles just because it seems all right in a particular case.  It would be cheap and shoddy and cowardly.”