“Yes, it will be rather difficult, although at the same time I perfectly understand what you mean.”
“I suppose it seems unnatural for a single woman to want a place of her own; at any rate, until she’s thirty.”
“It doesn’t run in the blood. A bachelor takes a private apartment, a spinster goes and lives in a boarding-house.”
“I am afraid it is quite true,” she answered, laughing, and then, with that perfect frankness about her sex which was one of her characteristics, she added, “But we spinsters—at least, that is, the poor ones—have to get ourselves husbands. It is potential matrimony that fills the boarding-house.”
“You consider matrimony a woman’s vocation?” I asked.
“I do.” And she looked grave.
My heart beat a little faster. I had made up my mind to put the question. I continued: “And do you think marriages are happier if based on a community of interests or on a passionate attachment?”
She looked at me honestly.
“I think,” she answered, “it is as impossible to generalise about marriage as about other things. It only leads to false conclusions. Of this, however, I am sure—if, when the flush of passion is past the interests of husband and wife lie apart, their chance of happiness cannot be very great. Don’t you agree?”
I did agree, and embroidered her conclusions with even stronger argument. I was never cynical if I could help it with Miss Gascoyne; it made her uncomfortable, and she had once told me that she believed all cynics were rogues with a white feather. At least, she had read so somewhere, and it had struck her as being true.