“John!” Mrs. Glamber suddenly called. “Is it really true about ferrets?”
“Ferrets?” the voice from across the passage repeated with a remote irritation. “Is what true about ferrets?”
“That the females die if they’re not mated.”
“But, my darling, really....” The voice was plaintive, full of reproach.
Mrs. Glamber clapped her hand over her mouth and only took it off again to blow a kiss. “All right,” she said very quickly. “All right. Really. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. Really.” She blew another kiss towards the door.
“Darling,” said Mrs. Glamber almost sternly, “you really must go on with your work.”
Minnie came to tea. She put the case--hypothetically at first, as though it were the case of a third person; then, gaining courage, she put it personally. It was her own case. Out of the depths of her untroubled, pagan innocence, Helen Glamber brutally advised her. “If you want to go to bed with the young man,” she said, “go to bed with him. The thing has no importance in itself. At least not much. It’s only important because it makes possible more secret confidences, because it strengthens affection, makes the man in a way dependent on you. And then, of course, it’s the natural thing. I’m all for nature except when it comes to painting one’s face. They say that ferrets....” But Minnie noticed that she never finished the sentence. Appalled and fascinated, shocked and yet convinced, she listened.
“My darling,” said Mrs. Glamber that evening when her husband came home--for he hadn’t been able to face Minnie; he had gone to the Club for tea--“who was it that invented religion, and sin, and all that? And why?”
John laughed. “It was invented by Adam,” he said, “for various little transcendental reasons which you would probably find it difficult to appreciate. But also for the very practical purpose of keeping Eve in order.”
“Well, if you call complicating people’s lives keeping them in order, then I dare say you’re right.” Mrs. Glamber shook her head. “I find it all too obscure. At sixteen, yes. But one really ought to have grown out of that sort of thing by twenty. And at thirty--the woman’s nearly thirty, you know--well, really....”
In the end, Minnie wrote to Hubert telling him that she had made up her mind. Hubert was staying in Hertfordshire with his friend Watchett. It was a big house, the food was good, one was very comfortable; and old Mr. Watchett, moreover, had a very sound library. In the impenetrable shade of the Wellingtonias Hubert and Ted Watchett played croquet and discussed the best methods of cultivating the Me. You could do a good deal, they decided, with art--books, you know, and pictures and music. “Listen to Stravinsky’s _Sacre_,” said Ted Watchett, “and you’re for ever excused from going to Tibet or the Gold Coast or any of those awful places. And then there’s Dostoievsky instead of murder, and D. H. Lawrence as a substitute for sex.”