“But suppose you repented of your past experiences?” I suggested.
“I shouldn’t wish them undone,” said Polly calmly. “I should merely see them in a new light, and they would fall back into their place in the background of my life’s pattern.”
“Poor experiences! Alas! Octavia, my poor friend!” I murmured.
“I feel the same thing about men,” said Polly; “they are in the pattern too. Sex is merely a matter of colour in the threads.”
“Which is what colour?” I asked.
“They are both all colours,” she said; “that is why they make such a good picture together.”
“Well, what do you mean by saying that it is the same with men?” I asked. “What is the same?”
“I mean that it takes a great many men to make one husband, just as it takes a great many Octavia Sinclairs to make one person’s life,” she explained.
“How many husbands have you besides Reginald?” I asked with some hesitation.
“It is very difficult to be patient with you, Martha,” replied Polly. “I have only one husband, as you know, but he is compounded of all the men I ever met. When I meet a man who is bad-tempered, I weave the thread of his ill-temper beside that of Reginald’s amazing patience, and you can’t imagine how Reginald’s colours glow. When I meet another who admires what Reginald calls my waffle-headedness (which he dislikes, by the way), I enjoy a perfect orgy of waffle-headedness, and use it all up before Reginald comes back, and then he restores the balance on the other side, and there, again, we have proportion, which is the art of life. I know several men whose trousers are either perfectly creased or not folded at all, and between them I realize that Reginald’s are the nearest to the ideal trouser, showing thought for the temple of his spirit without the exaggerated anxieties of you, for instance, Martha. Wasn’t there some poet who spoke of ‘the need of a world of men for me’? The lady whom he mentioned there had lost her husband or her lover, or whoever he was, and she felt, I suppose, that it would take several men to replace him. Now I have not lost mine, and his beauty is immensely enhanced by the qualities of all the rest of his sex. As for embracing and that kind of thing, that is quite beside the mark. I dare say that if we were all in the garden of Eden I might occasionally salute the marbled brow of one or two of the most perfect, just to emphasize some point in what I was saying, or as the expression of some passing emotion; but the thing has got to mean so much more than Nature intended, that one doesn’t do it, and it is no special deprivation to me to do without.”