He said with a sudden animation, “Look here,
let’s take it on that level, Rosalie. In
your case what’s the need? Call it dominion.
I’ve never exercised nor thought to exercise
dominion over you.”
“But you’ve not understood, Harry.
I gave up what was my life to me. To you I’d
only—chucked it. Oh, but that hurt!
That man’s supreme indifference, that is dominion.”
He said, “I’ll know it, dearest, for your
sacrifice.”
She put out a hand as if to hold that word away.
“Oh, trust not that. They talk of the ennoblement
of sacrifice. Ah, do not believe it. It
can go too long, too far, and then like wine too long
matured... just acid, Harry. I never said a bitter
thing to you until—thus sacrificing.
It is the kennel dog again. If I went on I’d
grow more bitter yet, more bitter and more bitter.
It’s why women are so much more bitter than
men. It’s what they’ve sacrificed.
I’m going back, Harry. I’ve got to.
You ask me if I’ve thought of everything.
I have; but even if I had not this outrides it all.
I have gone too far. She was right, that woman
I told you of, who said that for a woman, once she
has given herself to a thing, there is no comeback
from it. I have tried. It is not to be done.”
There was a very long silence. She said, “It’s
settled, Harry.”
He said, “Nothing’s been said, Rosalie,
that gets over what I have said. There’s
no home here while both of us are working. I have
a right to a home. The children have a right
to a home. Nothing gets over that.”
She answered, “Then, Harry, give yourself a
home. Give the children a home.”
He said, “I am a man.”
She answered, “I am a woman.”
The thing goes now at a most frightful pace for Rosalie.
One hates the slow, laborious written word that tries
to show it. There needs a pen with wings or that
by leaping violence of script, by characters blotched,
huge and run together, would symbolise the pace at
which the thing now goes. There’s no procession
of the days. Immersed in work or lost in pleasure,
there never is procession of the days, so hurtling
fast goes life. They crowd. They’re
driven past like snow across a window pane. The
calendar astounds. It is the first of the month,
and lo, it is the tenth. It’s the sixteenth—half
gone!—while yet it scarcely had begun; a
day after the twentieth is the date; it’s next
the twenty-fifth; it’s next—the month
has gone.... The month! It is a season that
has flown. Here’s Summer where only yesterday
the buds of Spring; here’s Winter, coming—gone!—while
yet the leaves seem falling.
It was like that the thing now went with Rosalie.
They call it a race. It isn’t a race, living
like that. It’s a pursuit. Engaged
in it, you’re not in rivalry, you are in flight.
You’re fleeing all the time the reckoning; and
he’s a sulky savage, forced to halt to gather
up what you have shed, ordered to pause to note the
things that you have missed, and at each duty cutting
notches in a stick.
