“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 overwork, 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.”
“I can’t help it, mother. I can’t do what I don’t approve of for that. How could I?”
“No, darling, of course you couldn’t; I apologise. But do try and see if you can’t get to approve of it, or anyhow to be indifferent about it. Such a little thing! It isn’t as if Barry wanted you to become a Mormon or something. … And after all you can’t accuse him of being retrograde, or Victorian, if you like to use that silly word, or lacking in ideals for social progress—can you? He belongs to nearly all your illegal political societies, doesn’t he? Why, his house gets raided for leaflets from time to time. I don’t think they ever find any, but they look, and that’s something. You can’t call Barry hidebound or conventionally orthodox.”
“No. Oh no. Not that. Or I shouldn’t be caring for him. But he doesn’t understand about this. And you don’t, mother, nor father, nor anyone of your ages. I don’t know how it is, but it is so.”
“You might try your Aunt Rosalind,” Neville suggested, with malice.
Gerda shuddered. “Aunt Rosalind … she wouldn’t understand at all. …”
But the dreadful thought was, as Neville had intended, implanted in her that, of all her elder relatives, it was only Aunt Rosalind who, though she mightn’t understand, might nevertheless agree. Aunt Rosalind on free unions … that would be terrible to have to hear. For Aunt Rosalind would hold with them not because she thought them right but because she enjoyed them—the worst of reasons. Gerda somehow felt degraded by the introduction into the discussion of Aunt Rosalind, whom she hated, whom she knew, without having been told so, that her mother and all of them hated. It dragged it down, made it vulgar.
Gerda lay back in silence, the springs of argument and talk dried in her. She wanted Kay.
It was no use; they couldn’t meet. Neville could not get away from her traditions, nor Gerda from hers.
Neville, to change the subject (though scarcely for the better), read her The Autobiography of Mrs. Asquith till teatime.
IV
They all talked about it again, and said the same things, and different things, and more things, and got no nearer one another with it all. Soon Barry and Gerda, each comprehending the full measure of the serious intent of the other, stood helpless before it, the one in half-amused exasperation, the other in obstinate determination.
“She means business, then,” thought Barry. “He won’t come round,” thought Gerda and their love pierced and stabbed them, making Barry hasty of speech and Gerda sullen.
“The waste of it,” said Barry, on Sunday evening, “when I’ve only got one day in the week, to spend it quarrelling about marriage. I’ve hundreds of things to talk about and tell you—interesting things, funny things—but I never get to them, with all this arguing we have to have first.”
“I don’t want to argue, Barry. Let’s not. We’ve said everything now, lots of times. There can’t be any more. Tell me your things instead!”
He told her, and they were happy talking, and forgot how they thought differently on marriage. But always the difference lay there in the background, coiled up like a snake, ready to uncoil and seize them and make them quarrel and hurt one another. Always one was expecting the other at any moment to throw up the sponge and cry “Oh, have it your own way, since you won’t have it mine and I love you.” But neither did. Their wills stood as stiff as two rocks over against one another.
Gerda grew thinner under the strain, and healed more slowly than before. Her fragile, injured body was a battleground between her will and
