I cannot recall that evening's talk in detail. Norman was unusually reticent. It was only by questions that I could draw him out.
"What do you think about free love?" I asked.
"It's a contradiction in terms. There's nothing free about love. It's tying oneself up in the tightest kind of a knot. A man will not only work his fingers off for the woman he loves—he'll have his hair cut the way she likes. A person in love doesn't want to be free. The hell of it is when the slavery continues after the love is dead. Don't try to free love—what's needed is the emancipation of the loveless."
We were silent for a while, very much distressed that we could find no solid anchorage. I was about to ask some other question when he broke out again on his own line of thought.
"Abolishing marriage won't do it. These Anarchists are naïve. They want to make things simple—say free love would simplify the matter. But all progress—all evolution—is towards more complex forms. Our brains are better than monkey brains because they're more complex. This "simple life" talk is rank reaction. I don't want to see laws abolished, but brought up to date. Civilization means ever increasing complexity in the forms of life. And we try to govern it by Roman law, plus a hodge podge of mediæval common law. Not less laws—but modern laws."
For a while his mind played about this idea, then he ended the discussion abruptly.
"Why put your problem up to me? As far as solving the man and woman question goes, my life has been a miserable failure. No matter what you do, whether you quit or go ahead—unless you're lucky as hell—you'll wish you were a eunuch before you're through."
So I got little help from him in this matter. I never really settled it. More or less it settled itself. There were forces at work which were stronger than my scruples. Sometimes it seemed horribly wrong to me and I decided not to go back to Cromley. But as the days passed I began to think more and more of Ann. Sooner or later I telephoned. I did not surrender without many struggles. But gradually she became an accepted fact in my life and with the years an increasingly valued fact. I am not proud of the moral indecisions, not at all proud of my contentment with what seemed less than perfect. But so it was.
Nothing in my life has seemed to me of so uncertain ethical value. Of course it was a violation of our traditional morality, but there are very few who blindly accept the conventions as always binding. I cannot dismiss it offhand as simply right or wrong; my own judgment in the matter was swung back and forth with almost the regularity of a pendulum.
At first it seemed to me unfair to take so much more than I could give. But after all I think little is gained by trying to treat love like merchandise, by trying to measure and weigh it. Certainly Ann would have been glad if I had loved her more wholly. But she regarded that as a work of fate, which no amount of wishing—by either of us—could change. She would have run away if our intimacy had begun to interfere with her work. She threw herself into her specialty with a wholeheartedness I have never seen equalled. Once I asked her if she had no desire for children.