"How d'you know what he's like?" Leslie had demanded. "What d'you know of his temper? Men with that heather-honey kind of smile and those deep dimples very often have a beastly temper. Probably jealous——"
"I would love him to be that."
"You wouldn't love to be poor, though," Leslie had gone off on another tack. "Poor, and uncomfortable."
"I shall never be comfortable again without him," Gwenna had said obstinately. "Might as well be uncomfortable with him!"
"In a nasty little brick villa near Hendon, so as to be close to the flying, perhaps? With a horrid dark bathroom? And the smell of cooking haddocks and of Lux all over it!" Leslie had enlarged. "And you having to use up all your own little tiny income to help pay the butcher, and the Gas Light and Coke Company, and the rates, and loathsome details of that sort that a woman never feels a ha'porth the better for! Instead of being able to get yourself fresh gloves and silk stockings and a few trifles of that sort that make absolutely all the difference to a woman's life!"
"Not all the difference, indeed," Gwenna had said softly. But Leslie had continued to draw these fancy pictures of married life as lived with Mr. Paul Dampier.
"Taffy, for one thing, you've never seen him anything but nicely-groomed and attractive to look at. You try to imagine him in what Kipling calls 'the ungirt hour.' They talk of a woman's slatternliness killing love. Have they seen a man when he 'hasn't bothered' to groom himself? That sight——"
She had shaken her black head ineffably over the mental image of it, and had averred, "That sight ought to be added to the Valid and Legitimate Causes for Divorce! A wife ought to be able to consider herself as free as air after the first time that she sees her husband going about the house without a collar. Sordid, unbecoming grey flannel about his neck. Three half buttons, smashed in the wringer, hanging by their last threads to his shirt. And his old slippers bursting out at the side of the toe. And his 'comfortable' jacket on, with matches and fur in all the pockets and a dab of marmalade—also furred—on the front. And himself unshaved, with a zig-zag parting to his hair. I believe some men do go about like this before their wives, and then write wistful letters to the Daily Mirror about, 'Why is Marriage the Tomb of Romance?'"
Gwenna had sniffed. "Oh! Some men! Those!"
"Valid cause for Divorce Number Ninety-three: The state of the bedroom floor," Leslie had pursued. "I, slut as I am, do pick things up sometimes. Men, never. Ask any married woman you know. Maudie told me. Everything is hurled down, or stepped out of, or merely dropped. And left. Left, my child, for you to gather up. Everything out of the chest-of-drawers tossed upon the carpet. Handkerchiefs, dirty old pipes, shirts, ties, 'in one red burial blent.' That means he's been 'looking for' something. Mind, you've got to find it. Men are born 'find-silly.' Men never yet have found anything (except the North Pole and a few things like that, that are no earthly good in a villa), but they are for ever losing things!"