Barry threw back his head and laughed, because she looked so innocent and so serious and young as she lay there among the pears and bandages.
"All right, darling. You've not needed to hold with it up till now. But now you'd better catch on to it as quickly as you can, and hold it tight, because it's what's going to happen."
"Oh, no, Barry. I can't.... I thought you knew. Haven't we ever talked about marriage before?"
"Oh, probably. Yes, I think I've heard you and Kay both on the subject. You don't hold with legal ties in what should be purely a matter of emotional impulse, I know. But crowds of people talk like that and then get married. I've no doubt Kay will too, when his time comes."
"Kay won't. He thinks marriage quite wrong. And so do I."
Barry, who had stopped laughing, settled himself to talk it out.
"Why wrong, Gerda? Superfluous, if you like; irrelevant, if you like; but why wrong?"
"Because it's a fetter on what shouldn't be fettered. Love might stop. Then it would be ugly."
"Oh very. One has to take that risk, like other risks. And love is really more likely to stop, as I see it, if there's no contract in the eyes of the world, if the two people know each can walk away from the other, and is expected to, directly they quarrel or feel a little bored. The contract, the legalisation--absurd and irrelevant as all legal things are to anything that matters--the contract, because we're such tradition-bound creatures, does give a sort of illusion of inevitability, which is settling, so that it doesn't occur to the people to fly apart at the first strain. They go through with it instead, and in nine cases out of ten come out on the other side. In the tenth case they just have either to make the best of it or to make a break.... Of course people always _can_ throw up the sponge, even married people, if things are insupportable. The door isn't locked. But there's no point, I think, in having it swinging wide open."
"I think it _should_ be open," Gerda said. "I think people should be absolutely free.... Take you and me. Suppose you got tired of me, or liked someone else better, I think you ought to be able to leave me without any fuss."
That was characteristic of both of them, that they could take their own case theoretically without becoming personal, without lovers' protestations to confuse the general issue.