"But aren't they the same things—in a way?"
"You won't say that when you've been married three years, child," said Dodo, with the bitterness that recalled her eight-years'-old divorce.
"Not exactly the same things, I suppose," Helen said quickly. "Marriage, I'd say, is a partnership. It's almost that legally in California. You couldn't build it on nothing but emotion—love. You'd have to have more. But Anne, why can't you make a marriage of two 'rounded out' personalities?"
"Because you can't make any complete whole of two smaller ones. They don't fit into—Look here. When I was a youngster down in Santa Clara we had two little pine-trees growing in our yard. I was madly in love then—with the music-teacher! Well, I used to look at those trees. They grew closer together, not an inch between their little stems, and their branches together made one perfect pinetree. I was a poetic fool kid. These trees were my idea of a perfect marriage. I fell out of love with the music-teacher because he was so unreasonable about scales, I remember! But that's still my notion of marriage, the ideal of the old, close, conventional married life. And—well, it can't be done with two complete and separate full-grown trees, not by any kind of transplanting."
"Well, maybe—" The fire crackled cheerfully in the silence.
"But if you break it up—free love and so on,—what are you going to do about children?" said Marian.
"Good Lord, I'm not going to do anything about anything! I'm only telling you—"
"Any one of us would make a splendid mother, really. We have so much to give—"
"Going to waste. When you think of the thousands of women—"
"Simply murdering their babies!" cried Willetta. "Not to mention giving them nothing in inspiration or proper environment."