_K._ ‘It’s a pity they don’t, that would solve a lot of the unhappiness one sees around. It must be awful to be deserted in one’s old age.’ _M._ ‘Talking about the old newspapers, it’s very amusing to read them in the British Museum, and see what wonderful things were expected of the leasehold marriage system when it was first legalised. All the abuses of the old system were to disappear: divorce, adultery, prostitution, and seduction--all the social evils were to go in one clean sweep.’ _K._ ‘How absurdly shortsighted people were then. Divorce is abolished, it’s true, but the scandals and misery, broken hearts and broken homes that it caused are now multiplied a thousand times. Infidelity may be less frequent, but if people have the wish and the opportunity for it they’re not likely to wait for a certain number of years, until it ceases to be technically a sin. The same with the other evils. There will always be a large number of men who postpone marriage for financial or other reasons, and a large number of women who can only earn a living in one way--the oldest profession in the world will always be kept going! Seduction, too, is not likely to cease as long as the law is so lenient to it. There will always be ignorant, silly, unprotected girls and always men to take advantage of them.’ _M._ ‘There seem to be just as many elderly spinsters, too, as before; the women who don’t attract men remain the same under any system, and often they are the best women.’ _K._ ‘How strange it must be _never to have had a husband!_’ _M._ ‘It must be peaceful, at anyrate; but spinsters don’t look any happier than married women.’ _K._ ‘I can only see one good result of the leasehold system--that women are as anxious for motherhood now as in the early century they were anxious to avoid it. We grow old with the fear of almost certain desertion and loneliness before us, and the one hope for our old age is our children----Oh! I am sorry, I forgot you had none.’ _M._ ‘Never mind, I often think of it, and whenever Jack admires or pays attention to another woman, I am in terror for fear he has found a fresh attraction and may want to leave me. What stuff they used to write formerly about the necessity for love being free. As if freedom were such a glorious thing! Why, we are all slaves to some convention or passion or theory; none of us are free, really free, and we wouldn’t like it if we were. It may be all very well for the fantastic love of novels to be free, but that strange _need of each other_, which we call “love” in real life, for want of a better term--_that_ must be forged into a bond, or what help is it to us poor vacillating mortals? Love must be an Anchor in real life--nothing else is any use!’ III THE FIASCO OF FREE LOVE ‘The ultimate standards by which all men judge of behaviour is the resulting happiness or misery.’ ‘Conduct whose total results, immediate and remote, are injurious is bad conduct.’ --HERBERT SPENCER.