"I'm not so sure we'd make good mothers. Just loving children and wanting them doesn't do it. There were six of us at home, and I know. I tell you, it's a question of sinking yourself in another individuality, first the husband and then the child. There's something in us that resists. We've been ourselves too long. We want to keep ourselves to ourselves. No, not want to, exactly—it's more that we can't help it."
"If you're right, Anne, it's a poor outlook for the race. Think of all the women like us—thousands more every year—who don't have children. We're really the best type of women. We're the women that ought to have them."
"We are not!" said Dodo. "We're freaks. We don't represent the mass of women. We go around and around in our little circles and think we're modern women because we make a lot of noise. But we aren't. We're of no importance at all, with our charity boards and our social surveys and our offices. It's the girls who marry in their teens—millions of 'em, in millions of the little homes all over America—that really count."
"In America!" Anne retorted. "You won't find them in their homes any more in France or England. The girls aren't marrying in their teens over there, not since the war. They're going to work—just as we did. They're going into business. Already French women are increasing the exports of France—increasing them! We may be freaks, Dodo, but we're going to have lots of company."
"It's interesting—what the war will do to marriage." They were silent again, gazing with abstracted eyes at the opaque wall of the future.
"Just the same," Sara insisted softly, "you leave out everything that's important when you leave out love."
Anne's small exclamation was half fond and half weary.
"We'll always have love. Every one of us has some one around in the background, sending us flowers. A woman without a man who loves her feels like a promissory note without an endorsement. But marriage!"
"And there's always the question—what is love?" Helen roused at the little flutter of merriment, and after a moment she joined it with her clear laugh.
"Why, love is just love," said Sara, bewildered.