"That's the very word!" Amory praised him. "Signifying darkness, where it's pretending to shed light all the time! If exploded ideas like those can be put into the Prayer Book, it seems to me that a Divorce Service ought to go into the Prayer Book too, instead of having to go to a court of law for it! And look, I ask you, at the position of woman in divorce to-day!" (Amory drove ahead as if it had been a question of Aunt Jerry's divorce already.) "Suppose she gets her decree: there's an odium attaches to her just the same whether it's her fault or not! _I_ call it the fault of Abraham and Sarah, and their stupid old Service! Laws that are too harsh are _bound_ to be broken! It's a duty to break them, so that we can get them altered. What we want is a rational tie, voluntarily entered into, and sweep all these archaic old penalties aside! Not that it's any business of mine; thank goodness _I_ shan't marry...." None the less, out of a noble love of abstract justice and a hatred of wrong merely because it was wrong, Amory found it intolerable. Then there was the minor apparatus. From the point of view of Eugenics, Amory would have thought that the worst possible preparation for the perfect race of the future was all this over-eating of indigestible things, and over-drinking of things that were, medically speaking, poisons. "Healths" indeed! Pretty name for them!... And all these buffooneries of throwing rice and confetti, and flinging an old shoe after the "happy" (ahem!) pair. For the wedding presents, Amory conceded, there was something to be said. The present economic conditions made it difficult for the really splendid young people to get married at all, and so it was right that they should be in a sense subsidized by those who had wrested (principally by callousness) more out of the competitive struggle than they (of a more sensitive make) had managed to wrest for themselves. Indeed, Amory's only complaint against the custom of giving presents was that it did not go far enough. What really ought to be done was that the State should pick its best specimens, on the principles laid down by Galton and others, and pension them off for one understood purpose, putting them in the midst of beautiful surroundings ... a sort of Endowment of Motherhood idea, but on a scale of the first magnitude, and not by mere doles, ... and, of course, with everything possible done to ensure the birth of girls.... Science would soon be able to do that at the rate at which it was advancing.... "I say, Amory, you are wonderful!" Cosimo breathed, rapt.... Amory said, "Silly old Cosimo!" But she herself could not help thinking that her lips had rather been touched with the coal.