Last year I walked in a suffrage parade because Effie wrote me that it was my duty, and the swing of it, the banners flying, the proud music, set gates wide for me on fields of new, inspiring experience ... all the paths that lead to the Shining Destiny ... why shouldn't women walk in them? I should think some of them might lead less frequently to bramble and morass. * * * * * "And after all," said Jerry, a day or two ago when I had read him some pages of my book, "you have only told your own story, you haven't found out why all the rest of us run so afoul of personal disaster. We, I mean, who as you say, nourish the world toward the larger expectation." "And after all," said I, "what is an artist but a specialist in human experience, and how can we find out how the world is made except by falling afoul of it?" "If when we fall we didn't pull the others down with us! I'm willing to learn, but why should others have to pay so heavily for my schooling? Where's the justice in making us so that we can't do without loving and then not let us be happy in it?" "I don't believe it is the loving that is wrong; it is the other things that are tied up with it and taken for granted must go with loving, that we can get on with." "Marriage, you mean?" "Not exactly ... living in one place and by a particular pattern ... thinking that _because_ you are married you have to leave off this and take up that which you wouldn't think of doing for any other reason." "You mean ... I know," he nodded; "my wife was always wanting me to do this and that, on the ground that it was what married people ought, and I couldn't see where it led or why it was important. But what if it should turn out that the others are wrong and we are right about it?" "Oh, I think we are _all_ wrong. People like us are after the truth of life, and marriage is the one thing that society won't take the trouble to learn the truth about. My baby, you know, I lost him because I didn't know how to take care of him, and there was nobody at hand who knew much more than I. But Effie's last baby came before its time and they saved it by science, by knowing what and how. Why can't there be a right way like that about marriage, and somebody to discover it?" "Then where would we come in--after it was all found out--if we are the experimentors?" "Oh, there'd be other fields. Why shouldn't it be that when we have found out our relation to the physical world--we are finding it, you know, radioactivity and laws of falling bodies--go on finding out the law of our relations to one another? And, when we've found that out, then there's all the Heavenly Host. We'd have to find out how to get on with Them." "And in the meantime we are spoiling a lot of people's lives because we can't get on with one another----" He broke off suddenly. "My wife is married again. I don't know if I told you."