Choosing their house! She had gone back to her rooms from the third day of their house-hunting gently amused at an addition to her compendium of lore on the male habit. It was in a way like the cat idea; at least it was, like that, reversal of a common opinion on distinguishing traits as between men and women. It went in her mind like this and, because it arose out of Harry, she laughed softly to herself as like this she shaped it: “They say a woman marries for a home. Wrong, wrong! It’s man that marries for a home--a home that, having got it, superficially he cares little enough about, and superficially uses as a good place to get away from; but that’s just how he uses his business, how he uses everything. Oh, he wants it, he wants it, and he marries for it far more than a woman wants it or marries for it. How plain it is! A man marries to settle down, a woman for just precisely the opposite: to break up; to get away from the constraints of daughterhood and of Miss-hood, as a schoolgirl, holiday-bound, from the constraints of school; to enlarge her life, not to restrict it; to aerate her life, not to compose it. Why, it’s inherent in a man, the desire for a home; it’s in his bones. Look at little boys playing--it’s caves and tents and wigwams they delight to play at; a place they can in part discover and in part construct, and then arrange their things in, and then go off exploring and then, all the time, be coming back to the delicious cave and creep in and block up the door! Girls don’t play at that; they play at shops and being grown up, at nursing dolls and not themselves being nursed. But that’s your man--a hunter with a cave, and the return to the cave the best part of the hunting. That’s what he marries for--a home; a pitch of his own; a place to bring his things to and wherein to keep his things; an establishment; a solid, anchored base; a place where he can have his wife and his children and his dogs and his books and his servants and his treasures and his slippers and his ease, and can feel, comfortably, that she and they and it are his,--his mysterious cave with the door blocked up, his base, his moorings, his settled and abiding centre. Dear Harry!”