“It comes to me in exactly opposite form,” Gillian laughed. “Not from personal motives, but from the same sense as Deb, of a familiar picture.... The wife forsaken, worn and weeping, face downwards on a sofa, while the man hurries away to the woman who is free, insolent and triumphant. The wanton scores—and that’s why I’ve always avoided being the wife.”
“The wife scores—and that’s why I’ve always dreaded being the wanton.”
Gillian laughed again. “I don’t mind if you call me a wanton, as long as you don’t call me a pioneer. And——”
“Oh, Jill,” cried Zoe in clamorous distress, “I thought you’d prefer it, I did really; or I should never have—but whenever I found people talking about you, I always excused you by saying you were a Pioneer of the New Era of Womanhood....”
“God!...” murmured the victim thus mislabelled.
“But aren’t you? I mean, don’t you believe that this is the beginning of a sort of New Era when we shall be as free as men?”
“I don’t!” Antonia cut in clearly. “I hope it’s rather the beginning of a New Era (as you call it) when men shall be as self-controlled as us. Why on earth should development always seem to be along the lines of licence? Girls nowadays will run wild all over the place for a bit, just to prove they’ve got their money and their independence and the vote and a special prerogative and a latitude and a longitude ... all that. And then they’ll get a sense of responsibility and cool down and settle down, and ask for limitations—and with that, a new phase, and perhaps a finer one, will begin. Your Era is nine times out of ten only a phase. I hold by the law—the old social law of monogamy. It has made itself out of the instinctive need of it, and it recurs again and again down the whole cycle of civilization—out of the instinctive need for it. There have been maidens, wives and harlots through all the ages—surely there’s no genuine need to muddle them all up? no need for free love, except for the exceptions from the herd?—and the exceptions can always be trusted to look out for themselves.”
“But it isn’t monogamy that Gillian & Co. are opposing,” Zoe contested—with the air of a wise little Bubbles, sitting on a footstool, with her primrose curls haloed in lamplight—“it’s marriage.”
“Marriage is quite a good institution, for those who want it. You arid Intellectuals never see that where two people need a symbolic or a religious or even a civic recognition that they belong together, they should be allowed to have it.”
“But the millions of cases where it has turned out badly——”