“Do you mean to tell me that you’re advocating marriage by capture?” Billy asked in an incredulous voice.
“I mean to tell you I’m arguing capture,” Ralph said with emphasis. “After that, you, can trust the marriage question to take care of itself.”
Argument broke out hydra-headed. They wrangled the whole evening. Theory at first guided them. In the beginning, names like Plato, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer preceded quotation; then, came Shaw, Havelock-Ellis, Kraft-Ebing, Weininger. Sleep deadened their discussion temporarily but it burst out at intervals all the next day. In fact, it seemed to possess eternal vitality, eternal fascination. Leaving theory, they went for parallels of their strange situation, to history, to the Scriptures, to fiction, to drama, to poetry.
Honey ended every discussion with a philosophic, “Aside from the question of brutality, this marriage by capture isn’t a sporting proposition. It’s like jacking deer. I’m not for it. And, O Lord, what’s the use of chewing the rag so much about it? Wait a while. We’ll get them yet, I betchu!”
All of Honey’s sex-pride flared in this buoyant assurance. It had apparently not yet occurred to him that he would not conquer Lulu in the end and conquer her by merely submitting to her wooing of him.
And in the meantime, the voiceless tete-a-teteing of the five couples continued.
“Say, Ralph,” Honey said one day in a calm interval, “it’s just occurred to me that we haven’t seen those girls, flying in a bunch for quite some time. Don’t suppose they’ve quarrelled, do you?”
Everybody stopped work to stare at him. “I bet that’s the answer,” Ralph exclaimed. His voice held the note of one for whom a private mystification has at last broken.
“But what do you suppose they’ve quarrelled about?” Pete Murphy asked.
“Me,” Honey said promptly.