Elizabeth and Fanny were not grotesques. They adjusted themselves to the war with marvellous precision and speed, just as they afterwards adapted themselves to the post-war. They both had that rather hard efficiency of the war and post-war female, veiling the ancient predatory and possessive instincts of the sex under a skilful smoke-barrage of Freudian and Havelock Ellis theories. To hear them talk theoretically was most impressive. They were terribly at ease upon the Zion of sex, abounding in inhibitions, dream symbolism, complexes, sadism, repressions, masochism, Lesbianism, sodomy, et cetera. Such wise young women, you thought; no sentimental nonsense about _them_. No silly emotional slip-slop messes would ever come _their_ way. They knew all about the sexual problem, and how to settle it. There was the physical relationship and the emotional relationship and the intellectual relationship; and they knew how to manage all three, as easily as a pilot with twenty years’ experience brings a handy ship to anchor in the Pool of London. They knew that freedom, complete freedom, was the only solution. The man had his lovers, and the woman had hers. But where there was a “proper relationship,” nothing could break it. Jealousy? It was impossible that so primitive a passion could inhabit those enlightened and rather flat bosoms. Female wiles and underhand tricks? Insulting to make such a suggestion. No, men. Men must be “free” and women must be “free.” Well, George had simple-Simonly believed all this. He “had an affair” with Elizabeth, and then he “had an affair” with Fanny, her best friend. George thought they ought to tell Elizabeth. But Fanny said why bother? Elizabeth _must_ know instinctively, and it was so much better to trust to the deeper instincts than to talk about things with “the inferior intelligence.” So they said nothing to Elizabeth, who didn’t know instinctively, and thought that George and Fanny were “sexually antipathetic.” That was just before the war. But in 1914 something went wrong with Elizabeth’s period, and she thought she was going to have a baby. And then, my hat, what a pother! Elizabeth lost her head entirely. Freud and Ellis went to the devil in a twinkling. No more talk of “freedom” _then!_ If she had a baby, her father would cut off her allowance, people would cut her, she wouldn’t be asked to Lady Saint-Lawrence’s dinners, she.... Well, she “went at” George in a way which threw him on his beam-ends. She made him use up a lot of money on a special license, and they were married at a Registry office in the presence of Elizabeth’s parents, who were also swept bewildered into this sudden match, they knew not how or why. Elizabeth’s father had feebly protested that George hadn’t any money, and Mrs. Winterbourne senior wrote a marvellous tear-blotched dramatic epistle, in which she said that George was a feeble-minded degenerate who had broken his mother’s tender heart and insultingly trampled upon it, in a low