Ah, well! Gertrude would make no opposition to my going, since absolute individual liberty is the very keystone in the arch of our coming marriage. I decided to ring up Dibdin. "Our line is out of order," the switchboard below informed me. "They’ll have a man up here as soon as possible." Frustration! I did not wish the colored door boy below to hear what I said. He has a notion of my dignity. With a restless agitation new to me I again fell to pacing the room, a room not contrived for exercise. It occurred to me that I must go to see my sister, my only near relative. She was sure to be at home, for she, poor girl, is always at home,—what with her three children and her broken health. If it were not that the damnable telephone is out of order, I would ring her up immediately. What with her three young children and an income the exact equivalent of my own, she has little diversion unless I take her to the theater or the opera. How does the poor girl manage, I wonder? I dread to ask her and she never complains. I ought to see her oftener; if only she lived nearer than the depths of Brooklyn. There is the result of romantic marriage for you! Poor Laura committed the error of falling in love with a man on a steamer when she was barely nineteen and marrying him secretly; after seven years and three babies, the scoundrel Pendleton, with his smooth ways and unsteady eye, deserted her, disappeared into the blue. The poor girl’s health has never been good since then. It is irritating to think that I might have done more than an occasional gift for Laura and the children. But I am so wretchedly poor myself. I still cannot comprehend how Laura could have been so inconceivably foolish as to marry that ruffian Pendleton before she had known him three months—and then to acquire three babies! Gertrude, at all events, could not be guilty of anything so perverse. Marriage—children—chains—slavery—how sordid it all is and how disturbing! Good enough perhaps for the hopeless middle class, semi-animal types, who have nothing else to expect of life, or to absorb them. But for folk with ambitions and ideals! What are my ambitions and ideals, I cannot at times help wondering? Useless to analyze. Freedom to have them is the first of all. How eager I used to be to discuss them with Laura during those long summers at our cottage in Westchester when life seemed endless and the future infinite. Between sets at tennis I poured out to her the things I was going to do in the world. Laura is only two years older than I, but how well she had understood and how sympathetic she was! It was the motherhood within her, I suppose, that drove her to the marriage and the kiddies.