She glanced helplessly around her pretty room. What, after all, was a woman’s work? This, she gathered, was his estimate. It is something with which she is permitted--by her husband, and also, he admitted, by the dispensation of providence--to wile away her idle hours; and it could never be seriously considered in the arrangement of a household. She was sure that his feeling was that this was his household, she his wife: it was the feeling of property, of which, she acknowledged, she had accused him at the end of all their quarrels. She seems to have brooded over this after he left the room in dudgeon. At any rate, she wound up by following him to his own room, standing in the door and making a speech to him. “What do you want, if we come down to it? Why on earth didn’t you marry Gertrude Cuyler? She wouldn’t have objected to your kisses when her mind was at work, because she hasn’t a mind.” She came back to it: she said that the quality in him which invariably egged her on to saying more than she had intended saying was his trick of silently looking at her. “He looks! He, merely, looks!” She said that she was thinking to herself: “He should take me by my back hair and sling me around.” She said that, standing in his door, she came to the realization that she wanted him to dominate her, and she knew that she would want to kill him if he did. She wanted him to be more brilliant than she, and she knew that it would be frightful for her if he were. She broke her narrative to tell me that his hair was ruffled like a terrier’s. “You know how I adore terriers?” she interpolated. It occurred to her to think of describing him as he looked now to her softened eyes. But she knew that the words at the back of her head would not today come at her bidding: he had done this to her. She said to herself: “I give up!” To give up to Nicholas meant that he took it for granted she had given up in everything. What was the use of experience, if one could not find the words for using the fruits of it in one’s books? Those prismatic words that had glittered in her brain were gone. She had, at the time, made a frenzied plea to her mind to remember. She seems to have spent the better part of an hour at her writing-table, although she told me that it had been a spiritual lifetime; Nicholas had faded--dimmed--gone into the past; and she was a novelist who used words to portray emotions. She was in despair. She told herself that creation is of two kinds, that of the mind and that of the body; if she wished to use the creativeness that came from her mind she must be careful how she prostituted it. Resentment flared up against him. She should be on her guard against him, if she wished to save the integrity of her work.