"You have no reasonable objection to the man?"
"I don't like his touching me."
"Do you like the thought of anyone's touching you? Not experimented yet?"
Ferlie shook her head, her face bent low over the glove-satchet she was sorting.
"Yet everyone, even in our effete, old-fashioned Guard of Die-Hards, has to tackle Sex in the long run," Margery reminded her. "Otherwise, how would the world go on? The Modern Aristocracy, alias The Smart Set which gets put on the stage, believes in facing more facts than usually exist. But it is a truth that, in marriage, familiarity breeds indifference to many matters one would have shied at the very mention of before."
"How do you know?" questioned Ferlie resentfully.
"I have watched my girl-friends marry and invited their confidences afterwards," said Margery with a retrospective smile. "Life is a muddle of rough and smooth for them all, whether they went into it with wilfully closed eyes or curiously wide-open ones. I'll tell you someone else who always seemed to me to be looking for sacramental happiness and getting terribly hurt when he found what he thought was trouble, just like you. The man who ought to have been your uncle and wasn't. I gather some folks have extra sensitive feet on the world's highway, and a too unshaken belief in the everlasting beauty of the hedge-flowers. By the way, do you know about that Vane woman he was so keen on when you were a kid at school?"
"Only that she turned out—not very nice."
Margery laughed queerly but did not pursue the subject.
"It's a mercy," she said, "that your Cyprian-man will have cut his wisdom-teeth by the time he sees her again. Do you ever hear from him now?"