“There’s eighteen years between them,” said Toomer.
“It’s one of those cases,” began Mr. Brumley with a note of scientific detachment, “where one is really tempted to be ultra-feminist. It’s clear, he uses every advantage. He’s her owner, her keeper, her obstinate insensitive little tyrant.... And yet there’s a sort of effect, as though nothing was decided.... As if she was only just growing up.”
“They’ve been married six or seven years,” said Toomer. “She was just eighteen.”
“They went over the house together and whenever she spoke he contradicted her with a sort of vicious playfulness. Tried to poke clumsy fun at her. Called her ‘Lady Harman.’ Only it was quite evident that what she said stuck in his mind.... Very queer—interesting people.”
“I wouldn’t have anyone allowed to marry until they were five-and-twenty,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin.
“Sweet seventeen sometimes contrives to be very marriageable,” said the gentleman named Roper.
“Sweet seventeen must contrive to wait,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin. “Sweet fourteen has to—and when I was fourteen—I was Ardent! There’s no earthly objection to a little harmless flirtation of course. It’s the marrying.”
“You’d conduce to romance,” said Miss Sharsper, “anyhow. Eighteen won’t bear restriction and everyone would begin by eloping—illegally.”
“I’d put them back,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin. “Oh! remorselessly.”
Mr. Roper, who was more and more manifestly not the Arctic one, remarked that she would “give the girls no end of an adolescence....”