When you have had your coffee, you’ll go down town And forget me. And I’ll forget you, and be comfortable and happy, Not having to remember you. But if I were married to you, You’d want me to keep on remembering you Every minute of the day, And I’d be so tired of it by the time you came home, I’d be sorry to see you. I have nothing against marriage, Except that it’s a bore Trying to live somebody else’s life. You can’t do it. Married people would be happier If they didn’t try to. They ought to live as freely As we do. All these sudden split-ups In the newspapers Are just this: The hysteria of woman is a shriek of boredom. Why, I’d die in a week if I had to keep on Being the particular kind of primrose That you think me. But the hysterical woman, There’s your flower changing, Jim. I’m just the common kind, but I know that I’m never the same, and I don’t want to be. If I’m the mother today, I may be the lover tomorrow, And I don’t want anybody sitting around on me And keeping me from growing. Your primrose probably changed Just to spite the old scientist who kept prying at it. Sex? No, it isn’t sex that these people are writing about, _It’s sentimentality_. They have an ideal, and if the first woman doesn’t answer it They think the second will, or the third. And they call it sex, or beauty, or urge— But it isn’t sex, Jim. I know what sex is. The reason I like you, Jim, Is because you haven’t any of these silly notions. Sex is honest and healthy. You say they trace morbid ideas to sex, But I tell you it’s the morbid, silly, beautiful ideas About Love and about being able to satisfy the ideal That are at the root of the trouble about sex! I can’t absorb you, and I don’t want to, And I don’t want to be absorbed. I don’t know whether you get what I mean. I like you, Jim, Because you leave a person free. After you go, I shall be busy with my own thoughts And my own life, just as if a friend had dropped in. I shall be anything I want to be. I shall change into Just as many primroses as I want to, and you won’t Know anything about it. You ought to get married, Jim, No, not me. But if you came here every night, I’d a thousand times rather be married to you, For I have never known anybody more tied up Than these “free-love” people. Am I happy? Well, I’m free. We’d all like to be free _and_ happy. Lots of people could be happy—ought to be happy, If they knew enough to be free..... Perhaps happiness is partly the chance of being unhappy— You and I, Jim, haven’t that. But what I hate is all this mussing up Of love and sex and the ideal—it isn’t life. One ought to start straight on earth, And take heaven when it comes.