“One of the most interesting and unsatisfactory aspects of the life of the employee to-day—and you know the employee is now in the majority in the adult population—is this. You see, we hold them celibate. We hold them celibate for a longer and longer period; the average age at marriage rises steadily; and so long as they remain celibate we are prepared with some sort of ideas about the future development of their social life, clubs, hostels, living-in, and so forth. But at present we haven’t any ideas at all about the adaptation of the natural pairing instinct to the new state of affairs. Ultimately the employee marries; they hold out as long as they possibly can, but ultimately they have to. They have to, even in the face of an economic system that holds out no prospects of anything but insecurity and an increasing chance of trouble and disaster to the employee’s family group. What happens is that they drop back into a distressful, crippled, insecure imitation of the old family life as one had it in what I might call the multiplying periods of history. They start a home,—they dream of a cottage, but they drift to a lodging, and usually it isn’t the best sort of lodging, for landladies hate wives and the other lodgers detest babies. Often the young couple doesn’t have babies. You see, they are more intelligent than peasants, and intelligence and fecundity vary reciprocally,” said Mr. Brumley. “You mean?” interrupted Lady Harman softly. “There is a world-wide fall in the birth-rate. People don’t have the families they did.” “Yes,” said Lady Harman. “I understand now.” “And the more prosperous or the more sanguine take these suburban little houses, these hutches that make such places as Hendon nightmares of monotony, or go into ridiculous jerry-built sham cottages in some Garden Suburb, where each young wife does her own housework and pretends to like it. They have a sort of happiness for a time, I suppose; the woman stops all outside work, the man, very much handicapped, goes on competing against single men. Then—nothing more happens. Except difficulties. The world goes dull and grey for them. They look about for a lodger, perhaps. Have you read Gissing’s _Paying Guest_?...” “I suppose,” said Lady Harman, “I suppose it is like that. One tries not to think it is so.” “One needn’t let oneself believe that dullness is unhappiness,” said Mr. Brumley. “I don’t want to paint things sadder than they are. But it’s not a fine life, it’s not a full life, that life in a Neo-Malthusian suburban hutch.” “Neo——?” asked Lady Harman.