Dodo sat up, sweeping her long, fine hair backward over her shoulders.
"Of course not. Jim's all right to play around with—"
"But when it comes to marrying him—exactly. There are only two kinds of men, strong and weak. You despise the weak ones, and you won't marry the strong ones."
"Now wait a minute!" she demanded, in a chorus of expostulation. "The one thing a real man wants to do is to shelter his wife; they're rabid about it. And what use have we for a shelter? Any qualities in us that needed to be shielded we've got rid of long ago. You can't fight life when you give hostages to it. We've been fighting in the open so long we're used to it—we like it. We—"
"Like it!" cried Willetta. "Oh, just lead me to a nice, protective millionaire and give me a chance to be a parasite. Just give me a chance!"
"Willetta's right, just the same," Dodo declared through their laughter. "It's the money that's at the root of it. You don't want to marry a man you'll have to support—not that you'd mind doing it, but his self-respect would go all to pieces if you did. And yet you can't find a man who makes as much money as you do, who cares about music and poetry and things. I'm putting money in the bank and reading Masefield. I don't see why a man can't. But somehow I've never run across a man who does."
"Well, that's exactly what I'm driving at, only another angle on it." Anne persisted. "The trouble is that we're rounded out, we've got both sides of us more or less developed. It all comes down to the point that we're self-reliant. We give ourselves all we want."
"You aren't flattering us a bit, are you?" said Marian. "I only wish I did give myself all I want."
"I don't know what you're all talking about," Sara ventured softly. "I should think—love—would be all that mattered."
"We aren't talking about love, honey. We're talking about marriage."