"Well--for all the things we have to give up." "What things?" "The things that belong to us. To our youth. Tennis, dancing--er irresponsibility in general...." "I've never once thought about any of those things; never once since I came to town" said Miriam grappling with little anxious pangs that assailed her suddenly; dimly seeing the light on garden trees, hearing distant shouts, the sound of rowlocks, the lapping of water against smoothing swinging sculls. But all that life meant people, daily association with sheltered women and complacent abominable men, there half the time and half the time away on their own affairs which gave them a sort of mean advantage, and money. There was nothing really to regret. It was different for Mag. She did not mind ordinary women. Did not know the difference; or men. "Yes but anyhow. If we were in the sheltered life we should either have done with that sort of thing and be married--or still keeping it up and anxious about not being married. Besides anyhow; think of the awful _people_." "Intolerant child." "Isn't she intolerant. What a good thing you met us." "Yes of course; but I'm not intolerant. And look here. Heaps of those women envy us. They envy us our freedom. What we're having is wanderyahre; the next best thing to wanderyahre." "Women don't want wanderyahre." "I do, Jan." "So do I. I think the child's quite right there. Freedom is life. We may be slaves all day and guttersnipes all the rest of the time but ach Gott, we are free." 7 "What a perfectly extraordinary idea." "I know. But I don't see how you can get away from it" mused Miriam, dreamily holding out against Jan's absorbed sewing and avoiding for a moment Mag's incredulously speculative eyes; "if it's true," she went on, the rich blur of the warm room becoming as she sent out her voice evenly, thinking eagerly on, a cool clear even daylight, "that everything that can possibly happen does happen, then there must be somewhere in the world, every possible kind of variation of us and this room." "D'you mean to say" gurgled Mag with a fling of her knickered leg and an argumentative movement of the hand that hung loosely dangling a cigarette over the fireside arm of the chair, "that there are millions of rooms exactly like this each with one thing different--say the stem of one narcissus broken instead of whole for instance." "My dear Miriam, infinitude couldn't hold them." "Infinitude can hold anything--of course I can see the impossibility of a single world holding all the possible variations of everything at once--but what I mean is that I can think it and there must be something corresponding to it in life--anything that the mind can conceive is realised, somehow, all possibilities must come about, that's what I mean I think." "You mean you can see, as it were in space, millions of little rooms--a little different" choked Mag. "Yes I can--quite distinctly--solid--no end to them."