“Despised and rejected of men,” she said
to Miss Salmon, holding forth in their bedroom on
her subject. “That’s what I call them.
Despised and rejected of men. Oh, don’t
hum louder than ever. It’s not irreverent
to say that. It describes a condition, that’s
all, and I’m using it because it describes this
condition, their condition, exactly. It does.
You can hum; but it does. They’ve never
done anything, they’ve never meant to do anything,
they’ve never tried to do anything except hang
round after some man. That’s all. They’ve
either caught him and now lost him; or they’ve
missed him and now go on missing him. That’s
their lives. That’s nearly any woman’s
life. It’s not going to be mine. If
anything were wanted to make the whole idea of marriage
and all that repulsive to me—and nothing
is wanted—that would. Despised and
rejected of men! I used to think and to say I
intended to be like a man and to do a man’s work
and have a man’s share. I tell you that
even getting so close to a man as that—I
mean as close as intentional emulation of him—even
getting as close as that makes me feel sick now.
It’s my own life I’m going to have, my
own place, my own share; not modelled on any one else’s.
If it were conceivable that I ever met a man I cared
tuppence about—but it isn’t conceivable;
that’s a quality that’s been left clean
out of me, thank goodness—but if it were
conceivable, what I’d offer would be just to
share; to go on living my own way and he his—Oh,
your humming! I mean after marriage, of course;
I think this free-love business they talk about is
even more detestable than the lawful kind—just
animalism. That’s all I’d do.
Me my life; he his life; meeting, as equals, when
it was convenient to meet. I’d like to
bring all these poets and people who write about love
into our dining-room to see those people. That’d
teach them!
Man’s love is of his life a thing apart;
’Tis woman’s whole existence.
What an existence!”
“Well, now—” (gulp).
CHAPTER VII
“You have pretended to dislike and to despise
men, but it was a pretence to deceive me and you are
a liar.”
This was the astounding opening of an astounding letter,
pages and pages, to Rosalie from Miss Salmon.
Pages and pages, having the appearance, each one,
of a battlefield or of a riot: a welter of thick,
black underscores strewn about like coffins or like
corpses, and a bristling pin-cushionful (black pins)
of notes of exclamation leaping about like war-dancing
Zulus or staggering about like drunken or like wounded
men. A welter you had to pick your way through
with epithets rushing against you at every step like
units of a surging mob hounding and charging against
an unfortunate pedestrian caught in the trouble.
