“Our discussions,” said Felix, “are devastatingly theoretical. We are accustomed to refer to everything we don’t like as a relic of barbarism. Marriage, for instance.... It’s essentially an intrusion by the Elders of the Tribe into the private affairs of the young. The Old People always think they know what is best. Originally, of course, their power to rule the lives of the young was far greater. Rose-Ann and I wouldn’t have been allowed to select a mate for ourselves. The choice would be made for us by the Elders; in their infinite wisdom they would choose for her a lord and master, and she would settle down at once to her proper womanly business of cooking his meals and bringing up his babies. Me they would doubtless have mated with some possessive young hussy who would efficiently smother and drug to sleep with her own physical charms any desire of mine for an impersonal intellectual life. And thus we would both have been made safe and harmless—Rose-Ann with her cooking and babies, and I with my harem of one. Both of us tied down body and soul, and thus presenting no menace to established institutions!” He was speaking quickly, with a feeling that it was all very absurd, this speech-making at large upon a subject which interested them now only in its specific and unique aspects. “But times have changed,” he went on. “This form of tribal control now exists only as a rudimentary survival—a custom to which one must superficially conform, and nothing more. So long as Rose-Ann and I _are_ allowed to choose each other, and decide for ourselves how we are going to live, we can very well permit the Tribe to come in, in the person of its official representative, for ten minutes, and ratify our choice!... There, those are my views, expressed in the uncouth intellectual dialect which Clive and I affect in these discussions. That’s just the way we talk.” “Very clever,” said Clive. “You shift your ground easily....” “A wedding _is_ an awfully tribal thing, isn’t it?” said Rose-Ann soberly. “Especially,” she added more cheerfully, “the old-fashioned kind. With the families and all. And the usher asking you which side you are on, the bride’s or the groom’s! I went to one when I was back in Springfield.” “I went to one,” said Clive, “once upon a time, in Chicago.... I had a sense of the girl’s having been recaptured by her family, after a temporary escape—recaptured and subdued. In her white veil, at her father’s side, coming down the aisle, she was so unlike the free wild thing I had known.—Somehow it seemed like a funeral to me—a triumphant and solemn burial of her individuality. I remember that I went away from church saying over to myself that little poem of Victor Plarr’s, that ironic little funeral poem—do you know it? It begins— “_Stand not uttering sedately Trite, oblivious praise above her— Rather say you saw her lately Lightly kissing her last lover!_”