“Oh, Marian, you’re too funny!”
“The real reason you don’t marry is the reason none of us’ll marry, except perhaps Sara,” said Anne.
Sara’s defensive cry was covered by Helen’s, “What’s that, Anne?”
“Well, what’s the use? We don’t need husbands. We need wives. Someone to stay at home and do the dishes and fluff up the pillows and hold our hands when we come home tired. And you wouldn’t marry a man who’d do it, so there you are.”
“Oh, rats, Anne!”
“All right, Dodo-dear. But I don’t see you marrying Jim.”
Dodo sat up, sweeping her long, fine hair backward over her shoulders.
“Of course not. Jim’s all right to play around with—”
“But when it comes to marrying him—exactly. There are only two kinds of men, strong and weak. You despise the weak ones, and you won’t marry the strong ones.”
“Now wait a minute!” she demanded, in a chorus of expostulation. “The one thing a real man wants to do is to shelter his wife; they’re rabid about it. And what use have we for a shelter? Any qualities in us that needed to be shielded we’ve got rid of long ago. You can’t fight life when you give hostages to it. We’ve been fighting in the open so long we’re used to it—we like it. We—”
“Like it!” cried Willetta. “Oh, just lead me to a nice, protective millionaire and give me a chance to be a parasite. Just give me a chance!”
“Willetta’s right, just the same,” Dodo declared through their laughter. “It’s the money that’s at the root of it. You don’t want to marry a man you’ll have to support—not that you’d mind doing it, but his self-respect would go all to pieces if you did. And yet you can’t find a man who makes as much money as you do, who cares about music and poetry and things. I’m putting money in the bank and reading Masefield. I don’t see why a man can’t. But somehow I’ve never run across a man who does.”
“Well, that’s exactly what I’m driving at, only another angle on it.” Anne persisted. “The trouble is that we’re rounded out, we’ve got both sides of us more or less developed. It all comes down to the point that we’re self-reliant. We give ourselves all we want.”
“You aren’t flattering us a bit, are you?” said Marian. “I only wish I did give myself all I want.”
“I don’t know what you’re all talking about,” Sara ventured softly. “I should think—love—would be all that mattered.”
“We aren’t talking about love, honey. We’re talking about marriage.”
“But aren’t they the same things—in a way?”
“You won’t say that when you’ve been married three years, child,” said Dodo, with the bitterness that recalled her eight-years’-old divorce.
“Not exactly the same things, I suppose,” Helen said quickly. “Marriage, I’d say, is a partnership. It’s almost that legally in California. You couldn’t build it on nothing but emotion—love. You’d have to have more. But Anne, why can’t you make a marriage of two ‘rounded out’ personalities?”
“Because you can’t make any complete whole of two smaller ones. They don’t fit into—Look here. When I was a youngster down in Santa Clara we had two little pine-trees growing in our yard. I was madly in love then—with the music-teacher! Well, I used to look at those trees. They grew closer together, not an inch between their little stems, and their branches together made one perfect pinetree. I was a poetic fool kid. These trees were my idea of a perfect marriage. I fell out of love with the music-teacher because he was so unreasonable about scales, I remember! But that’s still my notion of marriage, the ideal of the old, close, conventional married life. And—well, it can’t be done with two complete and separate full-grown trees, not by any kind of transplanting.”
“Well, maybe—” The fire crackled cheerfully in the silence.
“But if you break it up—free love and so on—what are you going to do about children?” said Marian.
“Good Lord, I’m not going to do anything about anything! I’m only telling you—”
“Any one of us would make a splendid mother, really. We have so much to give—”
“Going to waste. When you think of the thousands of women—”
“Simply murdering their babies!” cried Willetta. “Not to mention giving them nothing in inspiration or proper environment.”
“I’m not so sure we’d make good mothers. Just loving children and wanting them doesn’t do it. There were six of us at home, and I know. I tell you, it’s a question of sinking yourself in another individuality, first the husband and then the child. There’s something in us that resists. We’ve been ourselves too long. We want to keep ourselves to ourselves. No, not want to, exactly—it’s more that we can’t help it.”
“If you’re right, Anne, it’s a poor outlook for the race. Think of all the women like us—thousands more every year—who don’t have children. We’re really the best type of women. We’re the women that ought to have them.”
“We are not!” said Dodo. “We’re freaks. We don’t represent the mass of women. We go around and around in our little circles and think we’re modern women because we make a lot of noise. But we aren’t. We’re of no importance at all, with our charity boards and our social surveys and our offices. It’s the girls who marry in their teens—millions of ’em, in millions of the little homes all over America—that really count.”
“In America!” Anne retorted. “You won’t find them in their homes any more in France or England. The girls aren’t marrying in their teens over there, not since the war. They’re going to work—just as we did. They’re going into business. Already French women are increasing the exports of France—increasing them! We may be freaks, Dodo, but we’re going to have lots of company.”
“It’s interesting—what the war will do to marriage.” They were silent again, gazing with abstracted eyes at the opaque wall of the future.
“Just the same,” Sara insisted softly, “you leave out
