“One needn’t let oneself believe that dullness is unhappiness,” said Mr. Brumley. “I don’t want to paint things sadder than they are. But it’s not a fine life, it’s not a full life, that life in a Neo-Malthusian suburban hutch.”
“Neo——?” asked Lady Harman.
“A mere phrase,” said Mr. Brumley hastily. “The extraordinary thing is that, until you set me looking into these things with your questions, I’ve always taken this sort of thing for granted, as though it couldn’t be otherwise. Now I seem to see with a kind of freshness. I’m astounded at the muddle of it, the waste and aimlessness of it. And here again it is, Lady Harman, that I think your opportunity comes in. With these Hostels as they might be projected now, you seem to have the possibility of a modernized, more collective and civilized family life than the old close congestion of the single home, and I see no reason at all why you shouldn’t carry that collective life on to the married stage. As things are now these little communities don’t go beyond the pairing—and out they drift to find the homestead they will never possess. What has been borne in upon me more and more forcibly as I have gone through your—your nest of problems, is the idea that the new social—association, that has so extensively replaced the old family group, might be carried on right through life, that it might work in with all sorts of other discontents and bad adjustments.... The life of the women in these little childless or one-or-two-child homes is more unsatisfactory even than the man’s.”
Mr. Brumley’s face flushed with enthusiasm and he wagged a finger to emphasize his words. “Why not make Hostels, Lady Harman, for married couples? Why not try that experiment so many people have talked about of the conjoint kitchen and refectory, the conjoint nursery, the collective social life, so that the children who are single children or at best children in small families of two or three, may have the advantages of playfellows, and the young mothers still, if they choose, continue to have a social existence and go on with their professional or business, work? That’s the next step your Hostels might take.... Incidentally you see this opens a way to a life of relative freedom for the woman who is married.... I don’t know if you have read Mrs. Stetson. Yes, Charlotte Perkins Gilman Stetson.... Yes, Woman and Economics, that’s the book.
“I know,” Mr. Brumley went on, “I seem to be opening out your project like a concertina, but I want you to see just how my thoughts have been going about all this. I want you to realize I haven’t been idle during these last few weeks. I know it’s a far cry from what the Hostels are to all these ideas of what they might begin to be, I know the difficulties in your way—all sorts of difficulties. But when I think just how you stand at the very centre of the moulding forces in these changes....”
He dropped into an eloquent silence.
Lady Harman looked thoughtfully at the sunlight under the trees.
“You think,” she said, “that it comes to as much as all this.”
“More,” said Mr. Brumley.
“I was frightened before. Now——You make me feel as though someone had put the wheel of a motor car in my hand, started it and told me to steer....”