‘Exactly--two partners apiece. We’re all so complex nowadays that one can’t possibly satisfy us. Two would just do it. Two would serve to relax the tension of married life, and yet would not lead to what the newspapers call licence. Everyone would have another chance, and what the first partner lacked would be supplied by the second.’ ‘It’s not such a bad idea,’ said Isolda, musingly. ‘Launcelot could choose a good walker and bridge player for his alternative wife, and I’d try to find a man who hated cards and never walked a step when he could possibly ride.’ ‘I think it’s a grand idea,’ cried Miranda, enthusiastically. ‘Lysander could find a woman who’d play his accompaniments and love musical comedies, and I’d look out for a man who made a cult of the higher drama and had two permanent stalls at the Vedrenne-Barker Theatre.’ ‘It would simply solve everything,’ cried Amoret, ecstatically. ‘Whenever Theodore was disagreeable, off I’d go to my other one--and yet without feeling I was neglecting him, as he could go to _his_ other one. She would probably be a worthy, stolid, stayless lady with none of my faults, and when he was fed up with her stolid staylessness he could come back to me, and my very faults, you see, would be pleasing to him by reason of their contrast to hers, and _vice versa_.’ ‘It’s really a wonderful idea,’ said Isolda, thoughtfully, ‘I wonder no one thought of it before. There would be fewer old maids, as men wouldn’t be so terribly shy of matrimony when they knew there would always be that second chance. They wouldn’t expect so much from one wife as they do now. And think what a good effect it would have on our manners, too--how kind and polite and self-controlled we would be, under fear of being compared unfavourably with the other one.’ ‘Yes, it would certainly keep us all up to the mark,’ reflected Miranda, ‘slovenly wives would make an effort to be smart, and shrewish ones would put a curb on their tongues. Husbands would be quite loverlike and attentive, in their anxiety to outdo the other fellow.’ ‘It would smooth out the tangles all round,’ declared Amoret; ‘now just take the cases known to us personally. The Fred Smiths, for instance, haven’t spoken to each other for three years, just because Fred fell in love with Miss Brown and spends nearly all his time with her. Mrs Smith is broken-hearted, Fred looks miserable enough--a home where no one speaks to you must be simply Hades--and the Brown girl is always threatening to commit suicide. The affair has quite spoilt her life, and it must be very hard luck on the Smith children, growing up in such an atmosphere. My plan would have done away with all this misery: Fred could have married Miss Brown, and gone on living happily at intervals with Mrs Smith.’ ‘But what would Mrs Smith do in the intervals? She happens to have found no counter attraction.’