We can none of us escape "the day's work." Under the conventional "wild oats" scheme of life, we can place the whole burden upon the wife: and so find elsewhere "The Woman"—passionately and emotionally our ideal.
But no theory of free love was ever based upon two establishments. The whole weight of the new thought cries out for open, frank leaving one woman and going to the other; where possible by mutual consent. The secrecy, the misunderstanding, the divided allegiance, of the old world, is the very evil they are clamouring to wipe out. Yet can we leave our bills, our servants, and our children behind with the fixtures of the old "home to let"? Can we spend our life, or for that matter, more than a few days or weeks, in one perpetual holiday among the "beach-flappers" of Miss Amber Reeves' unstable Helen in Love and the boys they so gaily and easily annex?
The truth, of course, cannot be denied. These new, glorified sex-contracts (whether
entirely free, or on a "short lease" subject to "things going well") will, and must, involve all the trials of domesticity, without the compensations of a shared responsibility: a real bond to halve our sorrows and double our joys. There will, moreover, be a thousand times more occasion for incompatibility, the jar of nerves; where there is no steady, devoted endeavour towards mutual forbearance and understanding, no spur to forgive—in courageous hope. Life in hotels may, superficially, expose less friction; but it quickly destroys any reality in comradeship. Only daily service can build up Love.
The mistress, in fact, remains an enervating luxury, a habit of living beyond our emotional means, a sparkling drug.
We have not found the Ideal, because it does not exist.
X
HERE ARE TWO PICTURES OF FREE LOVE!
"After all, what is life for me? Strange doors in strange houses, strange men and strange intimacies. Sometimes weirdly grotesque and incredibly beastly. The secret vileness of human nature flung at me. Man revealing himself, through individual after individual, as utterly contemptible. I tell you, my dear eager fool, it is beyond my conception ever to regard a man as higher than a frog, as less repulsive."