gin to care like that girl!" And she told Gregg how Clara had witnessed Billy's coming and how Clara had been unable to understand her not "grabbing" Billy.
"That's part of what you meant, I see," she continued, "when you told me that night at home that people down here were most of them all right and also working out relations between men and women on a sounder basis than in lots of other places. Clara certainly is; I know Billy and mother and most of our friends at home would think me absolutely crazy if I said so, but I've never met a girl as fundamentally right as Clara; for she's honest and clean, absolutely. And when she marries any man—for though she said she never will, for she could never trust any one, she will—it won't be on any kept wife basis."
"What?" said Gregg quietly.
"That's what she calls it. That's what the other girls about here, whom I know and who are married, call the wives who live with their husbands without any intention of having children and without doing any real work; for you can't call taking care of a kitchenette apartment real work for a woman. Clara's friends have children or they work. They think that when a girl marries a man without intention of having children—children, plural, children, not just one child to display as your duty done to your husband and society—she's no better than the women we call a mighty ugly name. When Clara marries a man, she's going to bear children; and if she doesn't, or when she no longer does, she's not going to lie about and gad about and take her husband's money for what—for what, if she wasn't wearing a wedding ring, she couldn't do and stay in any decent society. But that's what lots and lots of us women—us respectable girls—do on the Drive and
