Marriage—children—chains—slavery—how sordid it all is and how disturbing! Good enough perhaps for the hopeless middle class, semi-animal types, who have nothing else to expect of life, or to absorb them. But for folk with ambitions and ideals!
What are my ambitions and ideals, I cannot at times help wondering? Useless to analyze. Freedom to have them is the first of all.
How eager I used to be to discuss them with Laura during those long summers at our cottage in Westchester when life seemed endless and the future infinite. Between sets at tennis I poured out to her the things I was going to do in the world. Laura is only two years older than I, but how well she had understood and how sympathetic she was! It was the motherhood within her, I suppose, that drove her to the marriage and the kiddies.
The scent of those summers comes to my nostrils now, the fragrance of lilac and honeysuckle, that brought ideas to one's head, dreams of achievement, of perfection and happiness. Who has that cottage now, I wonder? Poor Laura's dreams have been distorted into a very dismal sort of reality. And what of my own? But here is Griselda and she is announcing Dibdin.
That grizzled priest of what he is pleased to call science growled in a way he meant to be pleasant as he shouldered into my comfortable study and sank sprawling into my best chair. He never seems quite at home in a civilized room.
"Couldn't get you on the telephone," he remarked. "Thought I'd drop over and see what iniquities you're up to."
"As you see," I told him, "I'm deep in crime."
"Will you feed me?" he demanded with a gruffness that is part of his charm.
"Certainly. What else can I do when you come at this hour?"
"All right; then I'll listen to you," he said.