“Smirched!...

“You see, dear, one is passionately anxious for something—­what is it?  One wants to be clean.  You want me to be clean.  You would want me to be clean, if you gave me a thought, that is....

“I wonder if you give me a thought....

“I’m not a good woman.  I don’t mean I’m not a good woman—­I mean that I’m not a good woman.  My poor brain is so mixed, dear, I hardly know what I am saying.  I mean I’m not a good specimen of a woman.  I’ve got a streak of male.  Things happen to women—­proper women—­and all they have to do is to take them well.  They’ve just got to keep white.  But I’m always trying to make things happen.  And I get myself dirty...

“It’s all dirt that washes off, dear, but it’s dirt.

“The white unaggressive woman who corrects and nurses and serves, and is worshipped and betrayed—­the martyr-queen of men, the white mother....  You can’t do that sort of thing unless you do it over religion, and there’s no religion in me—­of that sort—­worth a rap.

“I’m not gentle.  Certainly not a gentlewoman.

“I’m not coarse—­no!  But I’ve got no purity of mind—­no real purity of mind.  A good woman’s mind has angels with flaming swords at the portals to keep out fallen thoughts....

“I wonder if there are any good women really.

“I wish I didn’t swear.  I do swear.  It began as a joke....  It developed into a sort of secret and private bad manners.  It’s got to be at last like tobacco-ash over all my sayings and doings....

“‘Go it, missie,’ they said; “kick aht!’

“I swore at that policeman—­and disgusted him.  Disgusted him!

     “For men policemen never blush;
     A man in all things scores so much...

“Damn!  Things are getting plainer.  It must be the dawn creeping in.

     “Now here hath been dawning another blue day;
     I’m just a poor woman, please take it away.

“Oh, sleep!  Sleep!  Sleep!  Sleep!”

Part 2

“Now,” said Ann Veronica, after the half-hour of exercise, and sitting on the uncomfortable wooden seat without a back that was her perch by day, “it’s no good staying here in a sort of maze.  I’ve got nothing to do for a month but think.  I may as well think.  I ought to be able to think things out.

“How shall I put the question?  What am I?  What have I got to do with myself?...

“I wonder if many people have thought things out?

“Are we all just seizing hold of phrases and obeying moods?

“It wasn’t so with old-fashioned people, they knew right from wrong; they had a clear-cut, religious faith that seemed to explain everything and give a rule for everything.  We haven’t.  I haven’t, anyhow.  And it’s no good pretending there is one when there isn’t....  I suppose I believe in God....  Never really thought about Him—­people don’t.. ..  I suppose my creed is, ’I believe rather indistinctly in God the Father Almighty, substratum of the evolutionary process, and, in a vein of vague sentimentality that doesn’t give a datum for anything at all, in Jesus Christ, His Son.’...