The Great Lover by Jill Dawson Page B

cheerily oblivious to its contents, plopping it down with my breakfast milk and apple, and as the door closed behind her, the letter cast a dark shadow–like a long, pointed finger–in my sunny bedroom.
    I (not as an individual, but as a Young Man) am now, it seems, to be entirely shut out of Noel’s existence. It’s Margery’s New Educational Scheme. Love, for a woman, she says, destroys everything else. It fills her whole life, stops her developing intellectually, absorbs her. ‘You’ll see what I mean if you look at a woman who married young,’ she grimly adds. ‘No woman should marry before twenty-six or-seven.’ (That’s ten more years of waiting, then! An ugly, dry decade!) ‘Do be sensible,’ Margery pleads. ‘She is so young–you are so young…’ All about my ‘wild writing’ and how I must ‘look ahead’ and a thousand things.
    On reading it, I leap from bed and call Nellie back. ‘Nell, Nell–come here!’
    ‘What is it? Ooh, I forgot the honey!’
    ‘No, not that, child. I need your opinion on something.’
    I wind the bed sheets round my torso–conscious of the girl’s blushes–and close the bedroom door behind me. Waving the letter as if Nellie had read the entire blazing sermon, I start at once: ‘Do you think Love destroys a woman? Finishes her off?’
    ‘I’m not sure what you mean—’
    ‘Margery Olivier has a bloody theory. No woman should marry before twenty-six or-seven–marriage, or rather love, ends a girl’s life, stifling her, finishing off her intellectual development, her–education, or—Oh, I’m not sure I understand at all.’
    ‘Well.’ The maid pauses, and I realise, with a furious stab, that she is seriously contemplating this theory.
    ‘The logical outcome,’ I interject quickly, ‘is that one must only marry the quite poor, unimportant people who don’t matter being spoiled, and leave the splendid ones untouched!’
    ‘Yes, I see. But I think there might well be a grain of truth in the idea that—You see, when I think of my dear mother, or my sisters, well, of course we read many penny books where love and marriage bring us the greatest happiness, and the popular songs say the same thing, but then when we take the temperature of our own hearts, or look at the lives of those girls around us—’
    ‘Surely, Nell, for every human being, male or female, love is the greatest thing? Don’t, please , tell me you’re going to agree with Margery. We must thunder against such mediocrity! Make a protest against idiocy and wickedness–not show a calm Christian spirit! Such a view is all reasonableness and cowardice and calmness–and how evil it is to let things slide and not snatch at opportunities!’
    Staring at Nellie, her violet eyes fixed anxiously on my face,I’m aware suddenly that I may be shouting, and that she appears to be a little unnerved. I let my hands swing to my sides and compose myself. The truth is, I feel mistrustful of myself, and full of fear and despair. A shadow of my old fears, the thoughts I have at sharing Dick’s…instability, comes back to me. It’s the tone of Margery’s letter. ‘Wait! Wait! She’s so reasonable about you now. Let her remain so,’ Margery says. That is painful. Is Noel Olivier reasonable about me? To have it rubbed in so. Oh, of course, I am delighted. Should I wave a hat with pallid enthusiasm, and say in a high voice: Hurray, hurray! Just what she should be–reasonable about me! Excellent, excellent!
    ‘I’m sorry, Nellie.’ I collapse on to the bed. ‘I find it hard to be reasonable. It’s not an emotion I admire, to be exact. It’s like fondness. Throw your fond in a pond! Give me love, I say, or nothing!’
    The girl’s expression is unreadable. She has a practised, clever way of glancing at the door, which tells me in no uncertain terms that she is thinking of her duties, without appearing rude, or making any reference to them.
    ‘Of course, of course. You must attend to your–your