Valentine thought profoundly about that.
“No!” snapped Valentine. “That’s just where you are wrong, sir. There was love. Certainly. But they kill it. They just kill love. I mean, I know what I’m talking about. Some of these young women treat love as though it was a naughty little boy who should be made to stand in a corner except as a great treat once in six weeks. I’ve thought about this a lot lately. Valerest has just gone out of her way to kill my love.”
“Sex,” said Mr. Lapwing thoughtfully.
“Sex?” said Valentine.
“Sex,” said Mr. Lapwing dimly. “Sex becomes very important when a man is—er—deprived of it. When he is—er—not deprived of it he becomes used to it, and it ceases to have any—er—importance at all. Women don’t like that. Women——”
“Damn women!” snapped Valentine.
“Women,” said Mr. Lapwing, “can be very tiresome. Wives can be intolerable. I have been married twice. England and America are strewn with good men suffering from their wives’ virtues. It is damnable. When a woman is faithful to her husband she generally manages to take it out of him in some other way. The mere fact that she is faithful makes her think that she has a right to be, well, disagreeable. The faithful wife also considers that she has a right to indulge in disloyal moods——”
“Disloyal moods!” said Valentine thoughtfully. “That’s good.”
“Fidelity,” said Mr. Lapwing, “can cause the devil of a lot of trouble in the home, unless it is well managed. Fidelity needs just as much good management as infidelity. I am telling you this,” said Mr. Lapwing, “because I think fidelity is beautiful and I hate to see it made a mess of. I draw from my own life, from my first marriage. I stuck firmly to those guns which you so aggressively brought into the conversation. A year or so went by. Then her parents approached me and suggested that we should come to some agreement, either to live together again or to arrange a divorce on the usual lines. They were good people. Their argument was that we were both too young to go on wasting our lives in this shilly-shally way.
“By this time, of course, the matter of my quarrel with my wife had faded into nothing. There remained only the enormous fact that we had quarrelled and that, since neither of us had tried to make the quarrel up, our love must obviously be dead.