not a question of
what the children would prefer while they were at school. It's what's
best for them. And anything would be better than to see their parents
hating each other and still having to live together."

"Yes. Anything would be better than that. Except that it would be a
useful and awful warning to them. But the point is, most married people
don't hate each other. They develop a kind of tolerating, companionable
affection, after the first excitement called being in love is past--so
far as it does pass. That's mostly good enough to live on; that and
common interests and so forth. It's the stuff of ordinary life; the
emotional excitement is the hors _d'oeuvre_. It would be greedy to want
to keep passing on from one _hors d'oeuvre_ to another--leaving the
meal directly the joint comes in."

"I like dessert best," Gerda said, irrelevantly, biting into an apple.

"Well, you'd never get any at that rate. Nor much of the rest of the meal
either."

"But people do, Barry. Free unions often last for years and
years--sometimes forever. Only you wouldn't feel tied. You'd be sure
you were only living together because you both liked to, not because
you had to."

"I should feel I had to, however free it was. So you wouldn't have that
consolation about me. I might be sick of you, and pining for someone
else, but still I should stay."

"Why, Barry?"

"Because I believe in permanent unions, as a general principle. They're
more civilised. It's unusual, uncivic, dotting about from one mate to
another, leaving your young and forgetting all about them and having
new ones. Irresponsible, I call it. Living only for a good time. It's
not the way to be good citizens, as I see it, nor to bring up good
citizens.... Oh, I know that the whole question of sex relationships is
horribly complicated, and can't be settled with a phrase or a dogma. It's
been for centuries so wrapped in cant and humbug and expediencies and
camouflage; I don't profess to be able to pierce through all that, or to
so much as begin to think it out clearly. The only thing I can fall back
on as a certainty is the children question. A confused and impermanent
family life _must_ be a bad background for the young. They want all they
can get of both their parents, in the way of education and training and
love."

"Family life is such a hopeless muddle, anyhow."

"A muddle, yes. Hopeless, no. Look at your own. Your father and mother
have always been friends with e