Free Love in Our Time by Norman Collins

entertaining him the meal took on a very different complexion. There were grape-fruit served in raised glass dishes and candles on the table and finger-bowls.
    The reason she went to so much trouble was a confused one. It was partly that she wanted to persuade her father that they really lived like that every night,and partly because, having had things like grape-fruit dishes and finger-bowls given to them as wedding presents, she felt that it was waste never to use them. And so it was that everything came out and was put on the table. Every time Mr. Biddle came he could scarcely conceal his astonishment. He really blamed Gerald. It seemed extraordinary to him that any man should expect his wife to go round dolling up the table when he could have saved her all that work. There was something essentially selfish about him which he didn’t like.
    The work in the kitchen took Alice until nearly six. There was too much to do to think about anything then. But at six o’clock when she emerged and began laying the table, the idea of the radiogram came back to her. Twice she broke off from, what she was doing and went through into the drawing-room to see how the furniture could be arranged to accommodate it. She did not now even so much as doubt that somehow the thing would be hers. By six-thirty, when Gerald arrived, the Majesto-phone was a part of the house:
    Altogether, it was a lucky evening on which to catch Gerald. He had had an unusually good day. By calling on the off-chance on an old acquaintance in Doctor Robinson’s “Eat-Sleep Insomnia Biscuits” he had found him promoted to Advertising Manager; and Gerald had walked out of the office with a contract for six half-doubles in his pocket. When he heard what Alice wanted his first thought was to indulge her.
    â€œIf you want one of those things,” he said, “you’d better have it. We might be able to get a bit of dancing in the evenings.”
    Alice loved him for saying it like that; it was generous. She knew other girls whose husbands doled them out afew shillings pocket money at a time as though they were children. There was something strangely humiliating about that sort of marriage: it was like being married to a cashier. And Gerald was so good-looking with it all. In his check suit—it had become his regular business suit by now—he had more the air of a guardsman in mufti than of a commission man on the advertising side. She felt happy every time she looked at him; and because she felt happy, she looked pretty too. And Gerald, for his part, felt that so long as she looked like that he couldn’t decently deny her anything.
    Mr. Biddle, however, was not so thoroughly convinced of the wisdom of the thing when Alice told him.
    â€œIf Gerald can’t afford to pay for it outright,” he observed, “in my opinion you can’t afford it at all.”
    As he spoke he shook his head over the memory of many floundering Mariners, overladen with Hire-Purchase agreements, to whose rescue he had gone either with a Life-Line or a Boat-Crew.
    â€œI’ve seen as many homes broken up by those instalment payments,” he said, “as I have by drink or betting.”
    But Alice stopped him.
    â€œGerald wouldn’t have agreed,” she said, “if we couldn’t have afforded it. Would you, Gerald?”
    Gerald ran his finger round the inside of his collar.
    â€œRather not,” he said.
    â€œWell, I suppose it’s none of my business,” Mr. Biddle agreed, his hand alighting on Alice’s shoulder, which he began to fondle affectionately. “But the people who make the things have got more money than you have, and if you asked them which they’d rather have—your three and nine or one of their blooming wireless sets—they’d choose your three and nine.”
    At that moment Gerald assumed command of the conversation. Mr. Biddle, he felt, had gone on long enough: he was availing