He heard her with his lips pressing tighter and tighter together until they were yellow white and creased with a hundred wicked little horizontal creases. Then he interrupted her with silent gesticulations. Then words came.
“I never did, Elly,” he said. “I never did. Reely—there are times when you ain’t rational. Married couples who’re assistants in shops and places!”
For a little while he sought some adequate expression of his point of view.
“Nice thing to go keeping a place for these chaps to have their cheap bits of skirt in,” he said at last.
Then further: “If a man wants a girl let him work himself up until he can keep her. Married couples indeed!”
He began to expand the possibilities of the case with a quite unusual vividness. “Double beds in each cubicle, I suppose,” he said, and played for a time about this fancy.... “Well, to hear such an idea from you of all people, Elly. I never did.”
He couldn’t leave it alone. He had to go on to the bitter end with the vision she had evoked in his mind. He was jealous, passionately jealous, it was only too manifest, of the possible happinesses of these young people. He was possessed by that instinctive hatred for the realized love of others which lies at the base of so much of our moral legislation. The bare thought—whole corridors of bridal chambers!—made his face white and his hand quiver. His young men and young women! The fires of a hundred Vigilance Committees blazed suddenly in his reddened eyes. He might have been a concentrated society for preventing the rapid multiplication of the unfit. The idea of facilitating early marriages was manifestly shameful to him, a disgraceful service to render, a job for Pandarus. What was she thinking of? Elly of all people! Elly who had been as innocent as driven snow before Georgina came interfering!
It ended in a fit of abuse and a panting seizure, and for a day or so he was too ill to resume the discussion, to do more than indicate a disgusted aloofness....
And then it may be the obscure chemicals at work within him changed their phase of reaction. At any rate he mended, became gentler, was more loving to his wife than he had been for some time and astonished her by saying that if she wanted Hostels for married couples, it wasn’t perhaps so entirely unreasonable. Selected cases, he stipulated, it would have to be and above a certain age limit, sober people. “It might even be a check on immorality,” he said, “properly managed....”
But that was as far as his acquiescence went and Lady Harman was destined to be a widow before she saw the foundation of any Hostel for young married couples in London.