"Of course! But women don't like change, variety—the best of us don't. We aren't venturesome. Men are, you see, and that's the difference.... I don't know that we mightn't become so if we had the chance, but we've been deprived of it for so long that we have lost the courage, the desire for change almost. What we know we cling to, isn't that so?"
She rose to capture the wandering Elsie.
"I must go back now to get Sam's déjeuner. Won't you come? He'd love to see you—he often speaks about you and your husband."
Milly accepted readily enough. Although she did not agree with all that Marion Reddon had said, she was soothed by the talk, and she had a curiosity to see the Reddon ménage in operation.
"So," she remarked, as they passed through the great gilt gate out to the noisy street, "you think a woman should have children to keep a man true to her."
"Tied to her," Marion Reddon emended, "and truer than he otherwise might be. Then they are something in case the husband quits altogether—if he turns out to be a bad lot. Most of them don't, of course; they are loyal and faithful. But if they do, then a woman has the children, and that's a world for any one."
"It makes it all the worse—if she has to support them without a man's help."
"I wonder! It's the incentive that makes work effective, isn't it?"
They crossed the vivid stream of the boulevard, the child between them, and mounted the hill towards the Panthéon.
"You know the time is coming when the woman will again be the responsible head of the family in form as she is in fact to-day, and then she will tolerate the man about her house just so long as she thinks him a fit father, and take another if she prefers him as the father of her children."