Never in face of that wide brilliance of eternity stretched on space would I give in to mental decay and a dun dim routine calling for nothing beyond the endowment of a halfwit.

Despised for being an old maid, indeed! Why are men so disturbed by a woman who escapes their spoliation? Is her refusal to capitulate unendurable to masculine egotism, or is it a symptom of something more fundamental?

Why have men invented monogamy? All the laws, all the philosophies and religions of academic education, as well as organised fighting and politics, are men’s inventions and are preserved by men as their special concern and business.

I chuckled into Popinjay’s twitching ears to imagine the shock my ideas in this direction would be for grandmas of the tame hen order and for Celibate Fathers. Of all the people I knew perhaps only two or three would discuss my theories without hysteria, though bishops and great-aunts can accept harlots as necessary and count technical virgins as more worthy of honour. This was another thought which to utter would be madness, and which to suppress seems canting cowardice.

Henry came jogging up with his strong white teeth showing in a smile. “What thought smote you to run away like that?” he demanded.

I diverted him with a bit of surface smartness. “I was thinking that it must be difficult to sustain the fragrance and escape the frowsiness of marriage: singleness would be more aesthetic.”

“Is that all! Now tell me if you could order a man to fit your ideas, what would he be like?”

I did not reply that it would be one who could put his finger on some hidden spring in himself and in me and in grand fusion reveal the fullness of life.

“Come now, what’s this fellow to be like?”

“At least he would not be afraid of freedom and the light of understanding for women as well as men. His mind would not prescribe asinine limitations for women as part of God’s will. He would not take rabies at the idea of a world where there would be no hungry children, no unprovided old age, and he would be ashamed to have harlots at street corners awaiting his patronage and then come to clean girls and blither about LOVE.”

“Hooray! Tell me some more.”

“There are other things he wouldn’t be that I have learned from old wives’ gossip, but I cannot enumerate them without being indecent. So many old wives take all the sweetness out of life because life has taken all the joy and sweetness out of them: and lastly, no potting, panning and puddening for me for a set of noodles that might as well remain unborn for all that they attain.”

When Henry next caught up to me he said, “You have two years more to get these notions off your chest. They are no end of fun.”

He refuses to release me until the 39-21 hour has arrived. As he will then be within a month of 40, and refuses to wait any longer because 39 will look so much better on the marriage certificate. I have not quite dismissed him because only in marriage can respectable women satisfy curiosity. The penalties for violating the social code are so painful that they are avoided by the sensitive with the care exercised against smashing over a precipice. Thrice free must be the innate wantons or the coarse who can plumb all heights and depths of curiosity and suck entertainment where they list unhampered by the agony of shame. The over-sensitive risk many chances of atrophying by the wayside.