When Ferlie was seventeen and a half, and the finishing school loomed ahead with its extra music lessons and picture gallery tours, Peter, too, began to have ideas about cages. He did not quite describe them in Ferlie's way but proved himself worthily her brother and, up to a certain point, allowed himself to be influenced by her opinions.
At nineteen, when Caius College claimed him, he showed signs of forging ahead at a pace which left her a little breathless. The enquiring expression had sobered, on the development of a well-chiselled nose, into the self-assured look of someone who has things to tell the world. To Ferlie he first imparted samples of these.
His reform scheme for the suffering Universe was to be based, of course, on psychics. As a first step towards bursting upon Humanity in the guise of Universal Healer, he had taken Havelock Ellis in large indigestible doses, concluding inflexibly that all trouble dated, not so much from Adam and Eve as from Lilith, who made of them Two, instead of One, like herself.
"Originally, we were in all probability One Perfect Sex," he told Ferlie. "Artificial experimenting caused the split, which, naturally, left one sex the complement of the other. We find the old allegory of Jupiter dividing by sword the race of gods which, having created, he had begun to fear. Ever since, each has been looking for its true half in order to regain the lost power the Perfect Whole first possessed."
"But surely the bi-sexual insects are the lowest in the scale of Evolution," argued Ferlie, shrinking somewhat from the suggestion that Peter's new Heaven and Earth, amalgamated, would contain no marrying nor giving in marriage. Because, though she, at fourteen, had pledged herself to eternally single blessedness, she rather liked to see other people marrying and driving away in their best clothes, looking happy. One never saw the same people again, somehow, after they had driven away. The couple which returned in their place seemed always to be a couple that asked nothing better of life than to sit still. The driving away spelt Adventure but, perhaps, they came back before they had reached that.
Ferlie was quite sure that, having once begun to drive away, she would never turn back.
"And you see"—she had lost Peter and returned with a jump to find him grazing in new pastures—"half the hysteria at the back of crime and all unhappiness is sexual. The economic conditions in this country which condemn so many women to single cursedness are disgraceful. And how can anything vitally important be accomplished for the Good of the Universe and the control of its illimitable forces, when this sex-hunt, and natural procreation, curtails such a disproportionate amount of human time and energy? The natural functions necessary for the continuance of the Race should be exercised almost as unconsciously as in the case of trees and plants, without stultifying analysation of emotion. It is time we strove for a simpler and less sentimental Ideal..."
Ferlie agreed that everyone who wanted to get married should be able to do so by means of a State Dowry, equal for all, but she did not see how Peter's Reform Scheme was to provide sufficient male mates even then.
"And is it a doctor you will call yourself, dear?"
"I shall be the First of my Kind," said Peter in tones which admitted no doubt of it. "Once through the usual exams, so as to give the old-fashioned geezers no handle—I have always felt Barker should have tempered the wind to the shorn lambs of his period—I shall strike out on Lines of My Own. I shall not attempt to explain them to you yet. But, first of all, there must come a Breaking Away!" He made a wide gesture with his arms, and Ferlie, furtively sympathizing with this draw-a-long-breath attitude, suspected that Peter would probably excel himself in the Breaking Away, whatever happened afterwards.