“I see it all,” said Eveley ominously. “You won’t be happy with him, and he won’t be happy with you, but you are all putting up with it because it is your—duty.”
“Yes, that is it, of course.”
Eveley poured herself another cup of coffee and drank it rapidly, without cream, and only one lump of sugar. “I am upset,” she said at last. “This has simply shattered the day for me. Excuse me, you’ll have to hurry, I only have five minutes left. I haven’t explained my belief and principles to you—you being young and newly married and needing all the illusions possible—but I do not believe in duty.”
“Gracious,” gasped the bride. “You don’t?”
“Absolutely not. No human being should do his duty under any conceivable circumstances. You see, there are two kinds, the pleasurable ones, and the painful ones. Pleasurable duties are done, not because they are duties, but because they are pleasurable. So they do not count. And a painful duty can not be a duty or it would not be painful. My idea is, that there must be a happy adjustment of every necessity, so when a duty is painful, it is the wrong adjustment. You and your father-in-law are giving yourselves pain because it is the wrong adjustment.”
“It sounds very clever.”
“It is the only beautiful plan of life,” said Eveley modestly.
“And then we would not have to live with father at all?”
“Most certainly not.”
“It certainly is a glorious theory,” said the bride enthusiastically. “You explain it to Dody, will you? He is positively death on duty, especially when it is painful. He’d do his duty if it killed him and me, burned the house down and started a revolution.”