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 Adventure in jesting merely to hearten myself may not possibly prove to be more of an adventure than I’ve reckoned on.”

Then the outside voice talked back to Jamie again, and it was a jeering voice that laughed at him and sneered at him. It said: “Well, Mr. Married Man, you’d better be getting home and fortify yourself with rest and sleep. You’d better press your trousers and see if the Master has got a decent scarf you can borrow. If you’re going to be a bridegroom, you’d better think about starting your preparations.”

Jamie, detecting the sneer in the voice, defended himself. He said: “Well what would you have done? If you hadn’t a relative on earth, if you knew you wouldn’t live to see the consequences, if a woman creature, young and attractive, was ready to throw herself into the sea before you, wouldn’t you save her by any means you could? Wouldn’t you give her a name that couldn’t hurt her and that might possibly help her all the rest of her life?”

He did not hear any answer to that, and so he turned his attention to the sea again. “I’d like to know,” he said, dourly, “what a lot of the mothers in this world mean. If they’ve known enough about the awful power of sex attraction themselves to marry a man and bear a child, why, in God’s world, don’t they know what they are letting the young folks up against when they turn them loose in utter and untrammelled freedom on the mountains and through the canyons and on the beaches and in the parks and the dance halls and the streets? Can’t they see that