“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 annoyed.  Your own scullery maid would turn up her nose at you.  The man that brought the milk will sneer.”

“I don’t think,” Gerda said, after reflection, “that I’m very easily annoyed.  I don’t notice things, very often.  I think about other things rather a lot, you see.  That’s why I’m slow at answering.”

“Well, Barry would be annoyed, anyhow.”

“Barry does lots of unpopular things.  He doesn’t mind what people say.”

“He’d mind for you....  But Barry isn’t going to do it.  Barry won’t have you on your terms.  If you won’t have him on his, he’ll leave you and go and find some nicer girl.”