MARGARET: If you can’t make love beautiful for your man, sooner or later, he’ll go to someone who can; or he’ll want to, which is as bad. FRANKIE: Are you happy? MARGARET: I suppose not, really. FRANKIE: What do you want? MARGARET: A man of my own, and children. FRANKIE: Doesn’t that prove your way’s wrong? MARGARET: I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. Gwen asked me. I’ve told you. GWEN: Thank you. [_COLIN and JOHN come in._ Come in and sit down. MARGARET: If she asks any questions, don’t you answer! COLIN: What sort of questions? MARGARET: Don’t ask me. GWEN: I wish somebody’d tell me what love is. JOHN (_sotto voce, getting out of his wet coat, disappearing into his bedroom with it_): A damned nuisance. COLIN: _I’ll_ tell you. GWEN (_eagerly_): I should like to know what _you_ think. [_Thus challenged, COLIN collects himself; he joins the group round the fire._ COLIN: As one gets older, and loses one’s illusions---- MARGARET: They’re off. COLIN: And realises half one’s life has gone, and there’s an end to it some day, one is apt to get lonely. A lost atom in an infinity of blackness. In that blackness is despair. Only one thing can dispel it--Love. Real love. None of your free sort, John! GWEN: What d’you mean? COLIN: I mean that love between two people that doesn’t need anything else, that won’t tolerate anything else, that’s lasting and tyrannical and jealous, is the only kind that’s worth while. JOHN (_reappearing_): What he really means is, he’s getting middle-aged. COLIN: Real love isn’t free. JOHN: Now listen, Grandpa; you’re nearly forty. COLIN: Shut up. JOHN: You’ve been at it twenty years. Have you ever had an experience which might be called free? COLIN: Don’t be silly. JOHN: You’ve passed the years of adventure, and you want to settle down. So you say: “Ah, I’m wise and sane and right, and all you poor young people are wrong.” FRANKIE (_very much at JOHN_): Do you think you know all about it because you’re wrong? JOHN: We couldn’t very well make a worse mess than they have, could we? FRANKIE: I’m not so sure. JOHN: Oh, Frankie! If we sat down with a pencil and paper and tried to work out a really unclean, intolerant, silly system, we couldn’t work out a worse one than exists to-day. Do you realise that? FRANKIE: No, I don’t. JOHN: I could make you. GWEN: Try--go on.