"I can't understand a man marrying a woman like that," Ninian said. "I mean, I can understand a fellow ragging about with a girl, but I can't understand him marrying her and ... and upsetting things!"
It was on the tip of Henry's tongue to say something about Ninian's belief in democracy, for he remembered that Gilbert, in one of his letters, had declared that Ninian had become a I'm-as-good-as-you-and-a-damn-sight-better-politician, but he did not say it.
"The girl isn't happy. Anybody can see she isn't happy, and Uncle Peter isn't happy, and between them they make us damn miserable. That kind of marriage is bound to fail, I think. People ought to marry in their own class!..."
"Unless they're big enough to climb out of it," said Gilbert.
"She isn't!"
It came to Henry suddenly that he was proposing to do what Ninian's Uncle Peter had done: marry a girl who was not of his class. He listened to Ninian and Gilbert as they talked of this intimate mingling of classes, and wondered what they would say if they knew of Sheila. Gilbert and Ninian were agreed that on the whole it was foolish for a man to marry that kind of girl. "It doesn't work," said Gilbert, and he told a story of a man whom his father had known, an officer in the Indian army who developed communist beliefs when he retired and had married his cook. "It's a ghastly failure," said Gilbert.
"I'm all for equality," Ninian said, "but it's silly to think that we're always equal now. We're not!..."
"And never will be," Gilbert interjected.
"I don't agree with you, Gilbert. I think that things like habits and manners can be fairly equalised!..."
"Minds can't!"