I could see, though, that she wasn't understanding in the least, that she was badly scared and even indignant at being forced to listen to a justification of what, by her code, could have no justification. She was standing not far from me, crushed against the wall, as though by the weight of opprobriousness that I heaped upon her, and her whole attention was centred on the door and the chance of getting out of it and away from what, in the mere despair of reaching her intelligence with it, I flung out from me now wildly. "I suppose," I scoffed, "that it never occurs to you that a gifted woman could be as delicate and feminine as anybody, if only you didn't make her right to fostering care and protection conditional on her giving up her gift altogether. You," I demanded, "who tie up all the moral values of living to your own little set of behaviours, what right have you to deny us the opportunity to be loved honestly because you can't at the same time make us over into replicas of yourselves?" I was sick with all the shames and struggles of the women I had known. I forgot the door and went over to her. "You," I said, "who fatten your moral superiority on the best of all we produce, how do you suppose you are going to make us value the standards you set up, when the price you despise us for paying, nine times out of ten we pay to the men who belong to you? What right have you to judge what we have done when you've neither help nor understanding to offer us in the doing? What right ... what right?" For the moment I had turned away in the vehemence of my indignation; I was pacing up and down. In the instant when my attention was distracted from the door, Pauline made a dart for it. I could hear her scurrying down the hall, but I went on walking up and down in my room and talking aloud to her. I was beside myself with the sum of all indignities. Was it not this set of prejudices which for the moment had presented itself in the person of Pauline Mills, which at every turn of my life had been erected against the bourgeoning of my gift? Was it not in the process of combating the tradition of the preciousness of women as inherent in particular occupations, that I had lost the inestimable preciousness of myself? Was it for what came out of Pauline's frame of life--I thought of Cecelia Brune here--that I had sacrificed my public possession of the man I loved. And what came out of it that was more to the world than what I had to offer? Had I cut myself off from the comfort and stability of a home, simply because in my situation as famous tragedienne I didn't see my way to bring up Helmeth's children so as to make little Pauline Millses of them? I was still raging formlessly in this fashion when Miss Summers, our ingénue, came to tell me that the cab waited to take us to the theatre for the matinée.