“Would have turned out just as badly if the couple had been living together in free love.”
“But, Antonia, then they could just have walked away from each other!”
“It’s very rare that it’s a simultaneous walk-away. The one walks ... and the other suffers. And this wrench would occur in any case. The legal wrench is a bit of a bother—and I grant you that the divorce laws might be reformed—but the human wrench is inevitable, in spite of all progress and propagandists and pioneers!”
Antonia was in battle mood, and Gillian gave her battle. They confronted each other not unlike a pair of splendid boys, the one erect with her back to the peacock window-curtains, hands clasped behind her, her head, a red-brown oval, slewed defiantly upwards; while the other rested her arms and chin along the back of a precariously tilted chair, which she vehemently bumped forward again to safety at the alliterative peroration of Antonia’s speech.
“Propagandists and pioneers—no! By heaven, you’re unjust!—do you suppose we’re out to be as intolerant of the Merely Married, as they have hitherto been of us? Look here—I loathe theoretical talk—I just claim a right to do what my own circumstances dictate, without being preached at and interfered with. There’s no such thing as Gillian & Co.—if I and my like are accidentally in the van of progress, we advance separately, each to her own peril. And if we’re only freaks and exceptions, lawbreakers and wantons—then again, each to her own peril. But what I do resent, savagely, is that Theo and I can’t have a child, without raising a stinging pestering swarm of minor considerations—servants, landladies, schoolmistresses, tradesmen—once there’s a family there’s got to be a permanent home, and that translates into all this sordid beastliness of prying and inspection, gossiping and blackmail, deceiving and finding-out, and the intolerant officialdom you’re so keen on, Antonia. And I daresay the kid would have to pay too, somehow, sometime. Well—we’re not going to give all this a chance. But I maintain that the arid Intellectuals are finer, truer stuff than the Herd, because they don’t bother the Herd, and the Herd will never stop bothering us. Never. They’re bothering now because Theo has a wife living. It doesn’t matter to them that I’m doing far better work and he’s a far better man, because we live together. The mind of the Herd can’t stretch to individual demand. It can’t be tender or intuitive—it just fusses. So—yes—call me a pioneer if you like; not of any glucose Movement to link people together for a common cause and so forth—there’s too much of that—but for the right to unlink oneself and to unlink one’s thoughts from other people’s thoughts—the right of detachment.”
“Oh dear!” exclaimed Zoe. “Isn’t it funny, how people who used to just talk, ever since the war have talked as though they were making speeches?”
Antonia and Gillian looked guiltily at one another. “I’m afraid she’s right,” Antonia sighed. “Sorry, Zoe. As a matter of fact, it’s perfectly ridiculous to be discussing the sex problem at all, since the war. Ancient cobwebs which the great broom has still left clinging....”
Again Gillian leapt to the assault. “The ‘sex problem,’ as you call it—a horrid phrase which suggests pamphlets and tracts—has survived a million wars and even caused one or two. So there’s no earthly reason why we shouldn’t be discussing it. Here we sit in proof of my statement—five girls who are all employed on war work (good thing Winnie’s out of the room for this reckoning), who still find some difficulty in sexually disposing of themselves—I mean, in the abstract. If Deb and Nell weren’t at the canteen, and Antonia a chauffeuse, and Zoe an affliction to the War Office, and I in my laboratory spying out new diseases that resent bitterly not being allowed to keep themselves to themselves; if we were just mooching and flirting and grumbling, and prodding our emotions, people might be justified in saying we were all in an unhealthy frame of mind from lack of topical co-operation. But as it is, the war goes on, and sex goes on, quite self-reliantly. You can’t cancel one against the other. It’s false mathematics.”
“My dear Jill, you can’t state in that arbitrary fashion that war isn’t going to affect the sex problem—it’s all right, Zoe, I’m not going to speak for long; take up the ‘Tatler’ in the meanwhile!—It will affect it in every possible way: lack of men; abnormal conditions; economic liberty for girls hitherto dependent——”
“I’m wrong. Oh, I’m totally wrong!... Deb, come out of what’s left of your hair and save me! I don’t want to hear about economic conditions. The off-side is yards shorter than the other.”