We had all meant to go home again. Indeed we had not meant—not by any means—to stay as long as we had. But when it came to being turned out, dismissed, sent away for bad conduct, we none of us really liked it. Terry said he did.
He professed great scorn of the penalty and the trial, as well as all the other characteristics of 'this miserable half-country. ' But he knew, and we knew, that in any 'whole' country we should never have been as forgivingly treated as we had been here.
'If the people had come after us according to the directions we left, there’d have been quite a different story! ' said Terry. We found out later why no reserve party had arrived. All our careful directions had been destroyed in a fire.
We might have all died there and no one at home have ever known our whereabouts. Terry was under guard now, all the time, known as unsafe, convicted of what was to them an unpardonable sin. He laughed at their chill horror. 'Parcel of old maids! ' he called them.
'They’re all old maids—children or not. They don’t know the first thing about Sex.
' When Terry said Sex, sex with a very large S, he meant the male sex, naturally; its special values, its profound conviction of being 'the life force,' its cheerful ignoring of the true life process, and its interpretation of the other sex solely from its own point of view.
I had learned to see these things very differently since living with Ellador; and as for Jeff, he was so thoroughly Herlandized that he wasn’t fair to Terry, who fretted sharply in his new restraint.
Moadine, grave and strong, as sadly patient as a mother with a degenerate child, kept steady watch on him,