LUNCH
"Don't think I'm going to be clever," she implored him, "and talk like a woman in a Meredith book. Well, quite baldly to begin with, one acknowledges that one puts oneself first, doesn't one? There may be other people, but it's ourselves that matter."
He had relaxed his face to a calm attentiveness, and, leaning limply back in his chair, looked at her with tired, kindly eyes, like the eyes of a monkey, between wrinkled lids.
"Granted, if you wish it for the sake of argument. But———"
"But you are protesting inwardly that the other people matter more? They do matter enormously. But the more they matter to you, still the more you're mattering to yourself; it merely raises your standard of values. Have you any children?"
"Six," said the tired man.
"I have three," said Marcia. "And a husband. Quite enough, but I am very fond of them all. That is why I am always so glad to get away from them."
He was cutting his lamb with quiet slashing strokes of his knife, and eating quickly and abstractedly, like a man whose habits of
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