Ambrose was a young man with an obsession. Two generations ago it would have been called Love; one generation past would have called it Women; but he, of course, called it Sex. He was a writer, he said. His father supported him, so that he didn’t need to be “commercial.” He was indeed so uncommercial that his creations never got beyond his own brain. However, he was only twenty-two, and still regarding his world.
The talk, during his visits, was supposed to be stimulating, and it resolved itself into a sort of duel between Ambrose and Rosaleen, in which Enid was the young man’s perverse second and Miss Mell assisted Rosaleen in her defense.
He used to bring lurid little magazines of strange shapes and colours, things that never lasted more than a few months.
“Why do they publish the things?” asked Miss Mell. “They certainly can’t pay. And nobody could possibly enjoy them.”
“Listen to this!” said Ambrose. “It’s good!”
And then would follow the expression of some individual’s point of view, which was called an “article,” always about fallen women, race suicide, and so on. It appeared from these little publications that it was not only necessary but “sincere” and altogether praiseworthy to repeat all the well-known facts and statistics on these subjects over and over, endlessly. No matter how trite, or how biased, so long as the author was “sincere” and stuck to more or less forbidden topics, his “article” must be published, and his opinion must be respected. It was a crime against society not to be eternally interested in these things.
Rosaleen was well aware that Ambrose had no intentions toward her of a personal nature; he was simply mildly attracted by her. But as a matter of principle he was forever urging on her his point of view. He couldn’t endure her inviolable reserve; it made him furious that she would not discuss these things. He was always saying how incomplete was the life of a woman without an “affair.” And he was not content with dissertations upon the influence of love on the soul; he became medical and pathological and sociological. According to him, the life of a spinster was not only anti-social and morbid; it was a sort of suicide; it led inevitably to madness and death. Facts did not disturb him; the numbers of self-respecting celibate women he was naturally obliged to meet, who were neither ill nor mad, and who were quite as happy as the married women, convinced him not at all. All these women, he insisted, were either absorbed in secret love-affairs, or—or they could not and did not exist. He denied them.
“I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you and your professors and your doctors and your writers,” said Enid, one day. “It makes you all frantic to think that women can get along without you. Well, they can and they do, plenty of them.”
Ambrose said, no, they didn’t. Or if they did, they were dreadfully unhappy.
“No more unhappy than with them,” said Enid.