"I’m older now—not so likely to change—but why go to law about it? Why do you want to marry me? Isn’t it partly because some people—perhaps your own family—would be shocked at a free love union? Well, haven’t I a right to think of my people? My sister, who’s dead, Billy’s mother—she didn’t think it was necessary to have a wedding ring and all that. My people would be grieved if I got married. They’d think I’d conformed—gone back on my principles. It would break mother’s heart. It would seem like a repudiation of her way of living. And she’s the finest mother anyone ever had. Even if I didn’t believe in free love, I’d never get married on her account." Despite what Ann told me I was decidedly embarrassed to meet her mother at breakfast. But when we appeared, Mrs. Barton kissed me. Her hands on my shoulders, she searched my face with her eyes. "Ann loves you very much, my boy," she said. "Be good to her." The breakfast was a far pleasanter meal than the dinner had been. Even Billy Boy’s stare was not quite so hostile. Yet as I rode into town on the early train my scruples came back. To be sure I had very little respect for the "sanctity" of formal marriage. I had seen too much of it in the Tombs. Certainly no amount of legal or religious ceremony is a guarantee of bliss or even of common decency. The minor marriage failures are attended to in the civil divorce courts. The domestic difficulties which are threshed out in the criminal courts show very clearly that there is no magic in church ritual to transform a brute into a good husband. Ten wedding rings will not change an alcoholic woman into a good mother. And then I was always witnessing "forced" marriages. Such was the cheap and easy solution in cases of seduction and rape in the second degree. Our law givers have decreed eighteen as the age of consent. The seduction of a girl under that arbitrary age is rape. Most of our grandmothers were married earlier. But the law is too majestic a thing to consider such details. It deals with general principles. If it has been flouted, Justice must be done though the heavens fall. However, it is an expensive matter to send a man to prison. So he is offered the alternative of marrying the girl. Justice gives no heed to the morality nor happiness of the two young people who have fallen in trouble, cares not at all for the next generation. Send the guilty couple to the altar. Their sins are forgiven them. The conventions have been vindicated. The juggernaut is appeased. No. I was very little impressed with the virtue of "legal" marriage. But I had a strong, if rather indefinite, ideal of a "true" marriage, a real mating, a close copartnership, a community of interest and a comradely growth, sanctified by a mutual passion. I saw no chance of this in my relation to Ann.