“Well, I’m glad you didn’t marry Ernesta. You’d have been only a lady’s maid, Ernesta is too publicly brilliant for you. But I didn’t foresee sister Emelia.” She thought a moment, “You look disconcertingly happy. It’s quite discouraging.” “How you must suffer!” “Just because I didn’t want to marry you, then and there, doesn’t mean I didn’t love you, John.” “I perceive my cue.” “Oh, no. I’m not starting a flirtation with you,” she said disengaging her arm. “I might have if you were unhappy. However, one word of advice,--for your own good.” “What now?” “Beware! You have married two mothers-in-law, mother and sister. Dear me, you don’t seem to respond. You _are_ happy, John. I’m running away.” The suggestion that Kitty had artfully implanted in my imagination disturbed me though I tried to shake it off. It was in line with my own growing forebodings. When I entered my home, I found tea spread and a group of women listening to Mrs. Agatha Billings laying down the daily law with occasional sallies from Ernesta. My mother-in-law is a woman of terrific dignity; calmly impressive as the classic portraits of Martha Washington whom she resembles. Ernesta is a young Amazon, who leads parades of protest on horseback, who writes Latin poetry, has taken her bar examination and spends five thousand a year on her clothes. Mrs. Billings was sitting like a statue of Memnon, planted in her opinions, and remaining thus rigidly entrenched gestured only with her fingers. Ernesta, on the contrary, strode up and down, using her hands like an Italian, throwing off her arguments like the brilliant cadenza of a coloratura soprano. Emelia, my wife, listened modestly but rapturously. There were present the militant Mrs. Zanzigger, head of an impressive concentration of women’s clubs and two stern faced delegates, with heavy wrinkled boots, from affiliated societies across the sea. I excused myself wearily and slipped into a further library where I could hear but not be seen. On the table, placed there for my education, were the works of Bertrand Russell, Elinor Keyes, Havelocke Ellis, and the whole gamut of the psycho-analysts. I took up a volume, concentrated, yawned and put it down. The voice of my mother-in-law coldly irritant rose from the other room. “The history of society wherever we study it profoundly is simply the record of the warfare of the sexes. No wonder then that marriage must remain the battle ground.” “But,” objected Mrs. Zanzigger, who was militant but not advanced, “in modern marriage, with equal division of economic responsibility and a common standard of moral judgment, isn’t an intellectual companionship possible?”