“If cowardice is an instinct, Henry.”
“How do you know it is cowardice? From what data do you get that conclusion? Betty, after all her philandering, has undertaken a definite contract. It binds her. It is a job. There is discipline in it, a chance for service. It creates new conditions of life which will certainly change her unless she quits. Haven't you noticed, all your life, what a relief it is to get out of indecision into a definite course, even if it costs you something?”
Again that faint smile of hers. “Turning conservative, Henry?”
He ignored this. “Life moves on in epochs, Sue. If you don't start getting educated when you're a youngster, you go most awfully wrong. If you don't accept the discipline of work as soon as you've got a little education and grown up, you're a slacker and before long you're very properly rated as a slacker. So with a woman—given this wonderful function of motherhood and the big emotional capacity that goes with it—if she waits too long after her body and Spirit have ripened she goes wrong, emotionally and spiritually. There's a time with a normal woman when love and maternity are—well, the next thing. Not with every woman of course. But pretty certainly with the woman who reaches that time, refuses marriage, and then is forced to admit that her life isn't working out. Peter has coined the word for what that woman becomes—a better word than he himself knows... she's a truffler.”
She was gazing at him. “Henry,” she cried, “what has struck you? Where's that humorous balance of yours?”
“I'm in earnest, Sue.”
“Yes, I see. But why on earth—”
“Because I want you to marry—”
It was at this moment that the Worm's small courage fled utterly out of his inexperienced heart. And his tongue, as if to play a saturnine trick on that heart, repeated the phrase, unexpectedly to what was left of his brain, with an emphatic downward emphasis that closed the discussion.
“I want you to marry,” he said.