_Katharine._ ‘I ought to look happy, I’ve had wonderful luck, but the truth is, I’m utterly tired. The conditions of marriage nowadays are horribly wearing, don’t you think?’ _M._ ‘Well, of course, we miss that feeling of peace and security that our mothers talked of, but then we also miss that ghastly monotony. Think of living year after year, thirty, forty, fifty years, with the same man! How tired one would get of his tempers.’ _K._ ‘I’m not so sure of that. Monotony of tempers is better than variety. All people have them, anyway. Besides, I’ve a notion that our fathers were nothing like so difficult to live with as our husbands are. You see, in the old days they knew they were fixed up for life, and that acted as a curb. We seem to miss that curb nowadays.’ _M._ ‘Yes, there’s something in that. I remember my grandmother, who was married at the end of the last century, used to say that her husband was her Sheet Anchor, and he called her his Haven of Rest.’ _K._ ‘Oh, I envy them! That’s what I want so badly--a haven, an anchor! How peaceful life must have been then before this horrible new system came in.’ _M._ ‘People evidently didn’t seem to think so, or why should they have altered it? But what’s your quarrel with the system? You’ve had four husbands and changed the first two almost as quickly as the law allowed.’ _K._ ‘Yes, and I’m only forty-one. I began too young--at eighteen--but one naturally takes marriage lightly when one knows it’s only for five years. One enters upon it as thoughtlessly as our happy mothers used to start their flirtations.’ _M._ ‘The consequences are rather more serious though; we are disillusioned women at the age when they were still light-hearted girls.’ _K._ ‘It’s the families that make it so difficult. Fatherhood is quite a cult nowadays. All my husbands have been of a philoprogenitive turn, and I have eight children.’ _M._ ‘Eight children! No wonder you look worried.’ _K._ ‘Exactly! my mother would have been horrified. Two or three was the correct number in her days, four at the utmost, and five a fatality and very rare.’ _M._ ‘Well, my dear, you needn’t have had so many; you should have curbed that cult of Fatherhood. No woman is compelled to bear children nowadays, as our unfortunate grandmothers were. Have you got all eight with you?’ _K._ ‘No, that’s just the trouble. I didn’t want to have so many, but of course now I’ve got them I want them with me, and of course their fathers want them too.’ _M._ ‘Oh dear! how tiresome; that’s the worst of having children in these times. I’m sometimes glad I have none.’ _K._ ‘Then perhaps you don’t know the law about the children of our present marriage system? A sum of money has to be invested annually for each child, in the great State Infant Trust; when the marriage is dissolved the mother has the sole custody of them, unless the father wishes to share it; in the latter case they spend half the year with each parent.’ _M._ ‘It’s fair.’