"I shall not want to marry. I am wedded to my profession."

"O Dudley!... Dudley!..." She slipped off the table where she had
been jauntily seated, and came and stood beside him, passing her arm
through his. "Can't you see I'd just die of a little house in the
suburbs, looking after the housekeeping: it's the most dreadful and
awful thing on the face of the earth. I'm not a bit sorry for slaves,
and prisoners, and shipwrecked sailors, and East-end starvelings; every
bit of sympathy I've got is used up for the girls who've got to stay in
hundrum homes, and be nothing, and do nothing, but just finished young
ladies. Work is the finest thing in the world. It's just splendid to
have something real to do, and be paid for it. Why, they can't even go
to prison, or be hungry, or anything except possible wives for possible
men who may or may not happen to want them."

"Of course you are talking arrant nonsense," Dudley replied frigidly.
"I don't know where in the world you get all your queer ideas. Woman's
sphere is most decidedly the home; you seem to -" but a small hand was
clapped vigorously over his mouth, and eyes of feigned horror searching
his.

"Do you know, I'm half afraid you've lived in your musty old books so
long, Dudley," with mock seriousness, "that you've lost all count of
time. It is about a thousand years since sane and sensible men
believed all that drivel about women's only sphere being the home, and
since women were content to be mere chattels, stuck in with the rest of
the furniture, to look after the children. Nowadays the jolly,
sensible woman that a man likes for wife or pal, is very often a busy
worker."