You see, Cornelia, the stark fact was that we couldn’t get accommodations anywhere except by pretending that we were married. Had we declined to make this pretense, we couldn’t have remained together at all unless we adopted all sorts of secret, underground, time consuming devices. It was a choice between the pretense and the secrecy—a Hobson’s choice, so far as I could see. Cornelia’s lips curled with contempt. She could not escape the reflection that she had showed much more courage when _she_ had been in London with Percival Houghton. I must add that free love, at any rate in my case, has proved a failure, a dead failure. I do not say that trial experiments in loving and living together should not be made, but I do say that the time is not ripe for them. At present, the two scores I have against free love are: First, that it simply won’t work; and second, that the only thing about it that is _free_ is the undesired advertising one gets. This conclusion has not been reached in what Mrs. Grey calls the cool, disinterested spirit of the dispassionate investigator. All the same, it is my conclusion. Of course, it is an abominable thing that a unique, intensely individual experience like love should have to be made the subject of public inquiry and official registration before it can claim to be legitimate. In a more highly civilized nation, such a state of affairs would be unthinkable. But amongst us! Well, when you think of our housing, transport, and domestic arrangements, when you remember how primitive and rigid these still are, can you expect more fluid and elastic relations between the sexes to be welcomed or even understood? "Huh," exclaimed Cornelia, half aloud, "she got all that from Robert." Please don’t picture me as sitting down and wringing my hands. What’s done is done and can’t be undone. I’ve made an experiment in love. And if the result hasn’t been what I expected, I have, like the experimental chemist, made discoveries I never dreamed of, discoveries about myself, about other men and women, and about human institutions. I can truly say that I haven’t spent four more unhappy weeks in my life, nor—mark this—four weeks that have done me more good. I call them unhappy weeks. But suppose I had _married_ Claude! Well, I dare say you’ve been thinking to yourself: "She is capable of anything; now she will try to sell out to smug respectability and settle down as Claude’s duly wedded and articled wife." I admit this would be the logical sequel to my new conclusions about love and marriage. But though I’m still fond of Claude, a great streak of doubt has crossed my dreams of a happy future with him.