COLIN: When are we coming to what you _would_ do? JOHN: I should go all out for a much larger tolerance; I should allow certain special relationships, _within_ the present system, to be open and decent and honourable. FRANKIE: There _is_ something else. GWEN: What? FRANKIE: ... It’s difficult to say. COLIN: Good heavens! Somebody’s found something they can’t say. It must be awful. GWEN: Go on, Frankie. FRANKIE: Well--if you go away with somebody--and it’s a failure, and you part, for the girl it’s not just as you were, is it? JOHN: No. I see what you mean ... it seems to me, chastity is a thing nobody has any right to inflict upon anybody else. GWEN: Hear hear. JOHN: It may be fine when it’s undertaken from real personal belief, but it’s not worth tuppence when it’s meant a tremendous effort of starvation that achieves nothing but starvation. MARGARET: You know a lot of girls are quite tranquil and untouched by all this, until it’s thrust under their noses. FRANKIE: That’s it. That’s where you’re so wrong, John. You don’t save girls from trouble, you _make_ it for them. GWEN: Quite a lot _aren’t_ tranquil. It’s wicked to keep people from love, when you needn’t. JOHN: Surely you have to deal with every case on its merits. When I have a daughter---- FRANKIE: When you have a daughter, you won’t be talking like this. JOHN: I shall want my daughter to be happily married; _and this is the real answer to you, Frankie_. If you want a happy, lasting marriage, the love-making part of it has got to be successful. MARGARET: Yes. JOHN: It’s fundamental. Bed-rock. The rock on which most marriages split, and up to now it’s been just left to chance ... a girl must have absolutely no real emotional experience until she’s married. Her first real experience may alter her whole being, yet by the time she’s allowed that first experience she must have tied herself up for life. Now I don’t think that’s merely silly. _I think it’s definitely wrong._ COLIN: I agree with you. JOHN: Grandpa agrees with me. I must be right. COLIN: Yes, my child, but I think you’ve got to be extremely careful over this experimenting business of yours. JOHN: Why? COLIN: You’ve got the artistic temperament, God help you. Most people haven’t. The majority of ordinary respectable human beings just want quiet, uneventful, peaceful lives. FRANKIE: Yes. COLIN: You can just as easily wreck people’s happiness by persuading them to go experimenting all over the place, as by denying them the right to do it. GWEN: Don’t just say “Don’t, don’t, don’t.” That’s negative ... a denial of things. We can’t live by that.