“They are where I came from. And probably most everywhere else, if you only knew. Nearly every man is a wandering wolf at heart, and if he’s got enough money there isn’t much to stop him. Nearly every woman knows it. Only they don’t admit it. So what? You wouldn’t think there was anything freakish about it if Freddie kept us all in different apartments and visited around. What’s the difference if he keeps us all together?”
The Saint shrugged.
“Nothing much,” he conceded. “Except, I suppose, a certain amount of conventional illusion.”
“Phooey,” she said. “What can you do with an illusion?”
He couldn’t think of an answer to that.
“Well,” he said, “it might save a certain amount of domestic strife.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “We bicker and squabble a bit.”
“I’ve heard you.”
“But it doesn’t often get too serious.”
“That’s the point. That’s what fascinates me, in a way. Why doesn’t anybody ever break the rules? Why doesn’t anybody try to ride the others off and marry him, for instance?”