“It doesn’t, Marko. I can see much
worse things just on the same principle.”
He said pleasedly, “Of course you can, can’t
you? Look at all this stuff there’s been
in the papers lately about what they call the problem
of the unmarried mother. Now there’s a
brute of a case for you: a girl gets into trouble
and while she sticks to her baby she’s made an
outcast; every door is shut to her; her own people
will have nothing to do with her; no one will take
her in—so long as she’s got the baby
with her. That’s convention and you can
imagine cases where it’s cruel beyond words.
But it’s no good cursing society about it.
You can’t help seeing that the convention is
fundamentally right and essential. Where on earth
would you be if girls with babies could find homes
as easily as girls without babies?” He smiled.
“You’d have babies pouring out all over
the place. See it?”
She nodded. “I do think that’s
interesting, Marko. I think that’s most
awfully interesting. Yes, cruel and hateful and
preposterous, many of them, but all fundamentally
right. I think that’s absorbing.
I shall look out for conventions now, and when they
annoy me most I’ll think out what they’re
based on. I will!”
“Well, it’s not a bad idea,” he
said. “It helps in all sorts of ways to
think things out as they happen to you. You don’t
realise what a mysterious business life is till you
begin to do that; and once you begin to feel the mysteriousness
of it there’s not much can upset you. You
get the feeling that you’re part of an enormous,
mysterious game, and you just wonder what the last
move means. Eh?”
She did not answer.
Presently she said, “Yes, you do still think
things, Marko. You haven’t changed a bit,
you know. You’re just the same.”
He smiled. “Oh, well, it’s only two
years, you know—less than two years since
you went away.”
“I wasn’t thinking of two years.”
“How many years were you thinking of?”
“Ten.”
They just sat there.
The insistent shrieking of a motor siren in the street
below began to penetrate their silence. When
it came to Sabre’s consciousness he had somehow
the feeling that it had been going on a very long time.
He jumped to his feet. The siren had the obscene
and terrific note of a gigantic hen in delirium.
“What the devil’s that?”
She received his question with the blank look of one
whose mind had no idea of the question’s reason.
The strangled gurgle and shriek from without informed
her in paroxysms of hideous sound. With a motion
of her body, as of one shaking off dreams, she threw
away the be-musement in which she had sat. She
screwed up her face in torture. “Oh, wow!
Isn’t it too awful! That’s Tony.
In the car. I told him I’d look in here.”
She glanced at the clock. “Marko; it’s
one o’clock. I’ve been here two mortal
hours!”
