“I expect we shall have legislation before long,” said Father Payne, “for breaking up homes where some definite evil like drunkenness is at work—­but I don’t want industrial schools for children; that is even more inhuman than a bad home.  We want more boarding out, but that’s expensive.  Someone has to pay, if children are to be planted out, and to pay well.  There’s no motive of duty so strong for an Englishman as good wages.  People are honest about giving fair money’s worth.  But it is no good talking about these things, because they are all so far ahead of us.  The question is whether anyone can suggest any practical means of filing away any of the roughnesses of marriage.  I do not believe that the problem is very serious among workers.  It is the marriage of idle people that is apt to be disastrous.”

“The thing that damages many marriages,” said Rose, “is the fact that people have got to see so much of each other.  What people really want is a holiday from each other.”

“Yes, but that is impossible financially,” said Father Payne.  “Apart from love and children, marriage is a small joint-stock company for cheap comfort.  But it is of no use to go vapouring on about these big schemes, because in a democracy people won’t do what philosophers wish, but what they want.  Let’s take a notorious case, known to everyone.  Can anyone say what practical advice he could have given to either Carlyle or to Mrs. Carlyle, which would have improved that witches’ cauldron?  There were two high-principled Puritanical people, which is the same thing as saying that they both were disposed to consider that anyone who disagreed with them did so for a bad motive, and exalted their own whims and prejudices into moral principles; both of them irritable and sensitive, both able to give instantaneous and elaborate expression to their vaguest thoughts,—­Carlyle himself with eloquence which he wielded like a bludgeon, and Mrs. Carlyle with incisiveness which she used like a sharp knife—­Carlyle with too much to do, and Mrs. Carlyle with less than nothing to do—­each passionately attached to the other as soon as they were separated, and both capable of saying the sweetest and most affectionate things by letter, which they could not for the life of them utter in talk.  They did, as a matter of fact, spend an immense amount of time apart; and when they were together, Carlyle, having been trained as a peasant and one of a large family, roughly neglected Mrs. Carlyle, while Mrs. Carlyle, with a middle-class training, and moreover indulged as an only daughter, was too proud to complain, but not proud enough not to resent the neglect deeply.  What could have been done for them?  Were they impossible people to live with?  Was it true, as Tennyson bluntly said, that it was as well that they married, because two people were unhappy instead of four?”

“They wanted a child as a go-between!” said Barthrop.