"No, she isn't. There are exceptions—don't I know it! but in most cases she's only too thankful to give it up. There's no glamour about it for the girl—she has lived all that out; the 'little six-roomed house and home sweet home' is the only ambition she has left. It's the man who finds the marriage dull. He was in love with being in love with an actress. He liked waiting for that smile over the footlights—about the middle of the first verse of her solo; it flattered him to know he was the one man in all the audience who was going to talk to her directly. When they're married she's just an ordinary girl—like Miss Smith, and Miss Brown, and the other girls he knew. The fairy has lost her wings. She's a very good little wife perhaps, but just a drab little mortal. He says, 'How romantic it used to be when she was a fairy!'—and goes fairy-catching outside another stage-door."
"Poor little mortal!"
"Men want romances. When you find them out, the most unlikely men are romantic; but when you find them out, nine hundred and ninety women in a thousand are domesticated."
"Are you?"
"There are the other ten," laughed Rosalind.... "And I'm not talking of society women—of course I don't know anything about them; I'm talking of every-day women, and us. Look at my friend! I suppose you'd take her for a bohemian through and through? She has had to earn her living in the Profession since she was sixteen, and she's slangy, and she'd shock your sort of woman out of her wits. Marriage is the last thing she thinks of now. But let a man she liked come along! She'd marry him on two pounds a week, and go through fire and water for him, and thank heaven for the joy of hanging up the washing in her own back yard."
Miss Lascelles, with a hint of coon steps, was singing—
"'What is the use of loving a girl
When you know she don't want yer to?'"
"I shouldn't have thought it," said Conrad. "She doesn't suggest domesticity in back yards."
"Does she suggest a boarding-school for young ladies?"
His eyebrows asked a question.