Anyone who wanted to be decent could be; and decency was an exact quantity. It took no account of kinks in the brain, of perverted instincts like poor Miss Carruthers'—of physical obsessions stronger than the will. If you were afflicted in any such way you ought to be "shut up." But how much pleasure and colour would be taken out of life if all except rigidly rectilinear and decent people were shut up!
Even Aunt Sophy herself—probably now seated in her solitary room at the boarding-house, before a desk loaded with papers on Woman Suffrage—Aunt Sophy had deserted her husband. Teresa wondered if she never regretted the domestic atmosphere, even though her boarding-house was an elegant one, and she was called a paying guest. But after all a domestic atmosphere pervaded by Aunt Sophy must almost itself suggest the paying guest. And her favourite phrase about the vanished Mr. Boulter had been: "Your uncle can be more disagreeable than any man that ever lived." Aunt Sophy thought marriage a hideous state of bondage. Teresa's cheerful view of it always astonished her, but she said, "Just wait, my dear. It isn't in the first year that you learn to know a man."
Poor Aunt Sophy! But she should not have married a disagreeable man. Marriage was very simple. You married a person you liked, and
