Cornelia's lips curled with contempt. She could not escape the reflection that she had showed much more courage when she had been in London with Percival Houghton.
I must add that free love, at any rate in my case, has proved a failure, a dead failure. I do not say that trial experiments in loving and living together should not be made, but I do say that the time is not ripe for them. At present, the two scores I have against free love are: First, that it simply won't work; and second, that the only thing about it that is free is the undesired advertising one gets.
This conclusion has not been reached in what Mrs. Grey calls the cool, disinterested spirit of the dispassionate investigator. All the same, it is my conclusion.
Of course, it is an abominable thing that a unique, intensely individual experience like love should have to be made the subject of public inquiry and official registration before it can claim to be legitimate. In a more highly civilized nation, such a state of affairs would be unthinkable. But amongst us! Well, when you think of our housing, transport, and domestic arrangements, when you remember how primitive and rigid these still are, can you expect more fluid and elastic relations between the sexes to be welcomed or even understood?
"Huh," exclaimed Cornelia, half aloud, "she got all that from Robert."
Please don't picture me as sitting down and wringing my hands. What's done is done and can't be undone. I've made an experiment in love. And if the result hasn't been what I expected, I have, like the experimental chemist, made discoveries I never dreamed of, discoveries about myself, about other men and women, and about human institutions. I can truly say that I haven't spent four more unhappy weeks in my life, nor—mark this—four weeks that have done me more good.
I call them unhappy weeks. But suppose I had married Claude!
Well, I dare say you've been thinking to yourself: "She is capable of anything; now she will try to sell out to smug respectability and settle down as Claude's duly wedded and articled wife." I admit this would be the logical sequel to my new conclusions about love and marriage. But though I'm still fond of Claude, a great streak of doubt has crossed my dreams of a happy future with him.
Shall I tell you the truth, Cornelia? Claude and I would make a very poor team. I have in mind, not his fits of bad temper, which are very annoying, nor his attacks of jealousy, which are monstrous. I have in mind his outlook on affairs and his active interests, which are in every respect different from mine. Claude is in love with the pomps and trappings of life; and I am not. He goes in passionately for elegance, luxury, all the externals which men admire in society or public institutions; and I do not. He wishes to study and master the ritual of social intercourse in all its forms (even in its Kips Bay form); and I will not. He is fond of the gay boulevards, the fashionable restaurants, the crowded promenades; I am fond of quiet places and a chair to myself in a corner of a park. Our divergence of tastes is almost absolute. We don't like the same theatres, concerts, pictures; we don't even like the same games.
The only game we ever enjoyed together was the great game of love. "What," you will exclaim, "you mean to contend that this game, which you played with such abandon, so thrilled and absorbed and united you both as to smother the thousand differences between you?" Precisely. That is what I contend, for that is what happened. It is weird, disconcerting, inexplicable, yet it is true.