“You haven’t seen Rosaleen’s latest, have you?” he asked.
“Latest what?” demanded Landry, stiffly.
“Latest—I don’t know what to call us. Latest One to Be Borrowed From. He’s the fifth, to my knowledge. And why do we do it? She’s not even grateful. It’s an interesting case.”
Landry withdrew his arm, under the pretext of lighting a cigarette.
“Not so interesting for her,” he said. “Poor girl!”
“It’s a sort of perverted sex instinct,” said Ambrose. “Her training has been so repressive that she’s afraid to accept love, so she substitutes money——”
“Rot!” said Landry, violently. “It’s nothing but an ‘instinct’ to get something to eat for herself and her husband.”
Then Ambrose said that it was perhaps a perverted maternal instinct.
“She ought to have had children,” he said. “As it is, she lavishes on him the maternal love she would have given to them.”
“She’s not perverted at all,” said Landry. “What you choose to call perverted is what I call—good.”