“I can’t help it, mother.  I can’t do what I don’t approve of for that.  How could I?”

“No, darling, of course you couldn’t; I apologise.  But do try and see if you can’t get to approve of it, or anyhow to be indifferent about it.  Such a little thing!  It isn’t as if Barry wanted you to become a Mormon or something....  And after all you can’t accuse him of being retrograde, or Victorian, if you like to use that silly word, or lacking in ideals for social progress—­can you?  He belongs to nearly all your illegal political societies, doesn’t he?  Why, his house gets raided for leaflets from time to time.  I don’t think they ever find any, but they look, and that’s something.  You can’t call Barry hide-bound or conventionally orthodox.”

“No.  Oh no.  Not that.  Or I shouldn’t be caring for him.  But he doesn’t understand about this.  And you don’t, mother, nor father, nor anyone of your ages.  I don’t know how it is, but it is so.”

“You might try your Aunt Rosalind,” Neville suggested, with malice.

Gerda shuddered.  “Aunt Rosalind ... she wouldn’t understand at all....”

But the dreadful thought was, as Neville had intended, implanted in her that, of all her elder relatives, it was only Aunt Rosalind who, though she mightn’t understand, might nevertheless agree.  Aunt Rosalind on free unions... that would be terrible to have to hear.  For Aunt Rosalind would hold with them not because she thought them right but because she enjoyed them—­the worst of reasons.  Gerda somehow felt degraded by the introduction into the discussion of Aunt Rosalind, whom she hated, whom she knew, without having been told so, that her mother and all of them hated.  It dragged it down, made it vulgar.

Gerda lay back in silence, the springs of argument and talk dried in her.  She wanted Kay.

It was no use; they couldn’t meet.  Neville could not get away from her traditions, nor Gerda from hers.

Neville, to change the subject (though scarcely for the better), read her “The Autobiography of Mrs. Asquith” till tea-time.

4

They all talked about it again, and said the same things, and different things, and more things, and got no nearer one another with it all.  Soon Barry and Gerda, each comprehending the full measure of the serious intent of the other, stood helpless before it, the one in half-amused exasperation, the other in obstinate determination.

“She means business, then,” thought Barry.  “He won’t come round,” thought Gerda and their love pierced and stabbed them, making Barry hasty of speech and Gerda sullen.

“The waste of it,” said Barry, on Sunday evening, “when I’ve only got one day in the week, to spend it quarrelling about marriage.  I’ve hundreds of things to talk about and tell you—­interesting things, funny things—­but I never get to them, with all this arguing we have to have first.”

“I don’t want to argue, Barry.  Let’s not.  We’ve said everything now, lots of times.  There can’t be any more.  Tell me your things instead!”