"I don't know. He said something about taking a vacation himself once, but he hasn't said anything very lately."
"Jean, I don't want to annoy you or interfere in any way with your life. You're a married woman and must manage your affairs. But, I've never seen any happiness come of a husband and wife having separate interests and not knowing what the other's going to do. Not that I've seen much happiness come of any married life. But if you do the best you can, you can't do any more and you can't have it on your conscience that the fault was yours."
Jean laughed. After all, if there was any change it must be in herself, for certainly Martha was the same as ever.
"Mummy, times have changed. No modern husband and wife clamp on each other's backs in the good old-fashioned way. Marriage isn't a pond in which you both drown, hanging madly to each other."
"What is it?"
"It's—it's a mutual arrangement. If you have the same interests and ambitions, you work them out together and if you haven't, why, each one works out his own."
Even as Jean spoke, she wondered when she had come to formulate this theory so decidedly. She remembered the night in the studio when she had promised to marry Herrick and life had seemed to her like a river in which they would both swim on together side by side. But the current had come between and now they were the width of the stream apart.
"You could always word things better than I, Jean, but sometimes it seems to me that that's all there is to them. They don't mean much when you get right down to the bottom of them. How can two people, 'whom God has joined together,' work out their lives apart? It's like the nonsense you and Pat used to talk, just as if you could do with life anything you happened to feel like. We weren't put in this world to follow every whim and there's no bigger whim-killer than the state of holy matrimony."
Martha stopped, cut the biscuits and laid each one carefully in the pan. When she had put them in the gas oven she began clearing up the table. Jean had gone back to her chair and sat looking absently into the garden.
"I don't believe, mummy," she said at last, "that anything that makes you feel smothered is right, no matter what holy state it belongs in. If that isn't 'wrapping your talent in a napkin,' then what is? Franklin doesn't care whether a hundred people live in a room or not. He doesn't think it matters whether people live like intelligent humans or like animals. He doesn't think that any one can change any one else or make the world a bit better."