embarrassment, he continued to give his help in passing the cake
and the bread-and-butter. As soon as she was gone, he turned round
to Philip. "That's a very pretty girl and a very nice girl," he
said simply. "I wonder, now, as you haven't a wife, you've never
thought of marrying her."

The remark fell like a thunderbolt on the assembled group. Even
Frida was shocked. Your most open-minded woman begins to draw a
line when you touch her class prejudices in the matter of marriage,
especially with reference to her own relations. "Why, really, Mr.
Ingledew," she said, looking up at him reproachfully, "you can't
mean to say you think my brother could marry the parlour-maid!"

Bertram saw at a glance he had once more unwittingly run his head
against one of the dearest of these strange people's taboos; but he
made no retort openly. He only reflected in silence to himself how
unnatural and how wrong they would all think it at home that a
young man of Philip's age should remain nominally celibate; how
horrified they would be at the abject misery and degradation such
conduct on the part of half his caste must inevitably imply for
thousands of innocent young girls of lower station, whose lives he
now knew were remorselessly sacrificed in vile dens of tainted
London to the supposed social necessity that young men of a certain
class should marry late in a certain style, and "keep a wife in the
way she's been accustomed to." He remembered with a checked sigh
how infinitely superior they would all at home have considered that
wholesome, capable, good-looking Martha to an empty-headed and
useless young man like Philip; and he thought to himself how
completely taboo had overlaid in these people's minds every ethical
idea, how wholly it had obscured the prime necessities of healthy,