He held old-fashioned views and rather thought that all women regarded motherhood as a duty and privilege of existence.

And, inside himself, he had never doubted that if this great happiness were ever granted to Nan, she would lose all those funny, unaccountable ways of hers--which alternately bewildered and annoyed him--and turn into a nice, normal woman like ninety-nine per cent.

of the other women of his somewhat limited acquaintance.
Man has an odd trick of falling in love with the last kind of woman you would expect him to, the very antithesis of the ideal he has previously formulated to himself, and then of expecting her, after matrimony, suddenly to change her whole individuality--the very individuality which attracted him in the first instance--and conform to his preconceived notions of what a wife ought to he.
It is illogical, of course, with that gloriously pig-headed illogicalness not infrequently to be found in the supposedly logical sex, and it would be laughable were it not that it so often ends in tragedy.
So that Roger was quite genuinely dumbfounded at Nan's heterodox pronouncement on the relative values of music and babies.
A baby was not in the least an object of absorbing interest to her.

It cried out of tune and made ear-piercing noises that were not included in even the most modern of compositions.

Moreover, she was not by nature of the maternal type of woman, to whom marriage is but the beautiful path which leads to motherhood.