"But what difference could being married--I mean not being married--make?"
"Ah!" said Katie, with satisfaction at having found her bearings again. "Walter's got a whole Lecture on that. It always thrills everybody. Amory thinks it's almost his best--after the '_Synthetic Protoplasm_' one, of course--that's admitted by everybody to be quite _the_ best!"[1]
"Proto ... but I thought those were a kind of oats!" said poor Dorothy, utterly bewildered.
"Oats!" cried Katie in a sort of whispered shriek. "Why, it's--it's--but I don't know even how to _begin_ to explain it! Do you mean to say you haven't read about these things?"
"Not Monod, nor Ellen Key, nor Sebastien Faure, nor Malom!----"
"N-o." Dorothy felt horribly ashamed of herself.
"But--but--those _lovely_ little boys of yours!----"
She gazed wide-eyed at the disconcerted Dorothy....
It was the humiliating truth: Dorothy had never heard of the existence of a single one of these writers and leaders of thought. She had borne Noel in black ignorance of what they had had to say about the Torch of the Race, and Jackie and the third Bit for all the world as if they had never set pen to paper. Monod had not held her hand, nor Faure been asked for his imprimatur; Key had hymned Love superfluously, and the Synthesists, equally superfluously, its supersession. For a moment she anxiously hoped that it was all right, and then, as Katie went on, the marvel of it all overwhelmed her again.
The dictum that desirable children could be born only _out_ of wedlock! That stupendous suggestion of Walter's to millionaires who did not know what to do with their money, that, for the improvement of the Race, they should endow with a thousand pounds every poor little come-by-chance that weighed eleven pounds at birth! That other proposal, that twenty years could straightway be added to woman's life and beauty by a mere influencing of her thoughts about the Chromosome--whatever it was!... Poor uncultured Dorothy did not know whether she was on her head or her heels. She had never dreamed, until Katie told her, that before marrying Stan she ought to have gone to the insect-world, or to the world of molluscs and crustacæ, to learn how _they_ maintained the integrity of their own highest type--whether by pulling their wings off after the flight, or devouring their husbands, or--or--or what! She had heard of the moral lessons that can be learned of the ant, but it had not struck her that she and Stan might, by means of a little more study and care, have lifted up the economy of their little flat to the level of the marvellously-organized domesticity you see when you kick over a stone.