Labrador (N.L.) -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Love stories, English
She had already gone some way in the composition of a touching letter of
farewell to him, containing a luminous analysis of her own defects,
before her common-sense swept away this imaginative exercise.
Meanwhile, as if it had been working at her problem all the time that
this exciting farewell epistle had occupied the foreground of her
thoughts, her natural lucidity emerged with the manifest conclusion that
she had to alter her way of living. She had been extraordinarily
regardless of him, she only began to see that, and now she had to take
up the problem of his necessities. Her self-examination now that it had
begun was thorough. She had always told herself before that she had made
a most wonderful and beautiful little home for him. But had she made it
for him? Had he as a matter of fact ever wanted it, except that he was
glad to have it through her? No doubt it had given him delight and
happiness, it had been a marvellous little casket of love for them, but
how far did that outweigh the burthen and limitation it had imposed upon
him? She had always assumed he was beyond measure grateful to her for
his home, in spite of all her bills, but was he? It was like sticking a
knife into herself to ask that, but she was now in a phase heroic enough
for the task--was he? She had always seen herself as the giver of
bounties; greatest bounty of all was Margharita. She had faced pains and
terrors and the shadow of death to give him Margharita. Now with Daffy's
illuminating conversation in her mind, she could turn the light upon a
haunting doubt that had been lurking in the darkness for a long time.
Had he really so greatly wanted Margharita? Had she ever troubled to get
to the bottom of that before? Hadn't she as a matter of fact wanted
Margharita ten thousand times more than he had done? Hadn't she in
effect imposed Margharita upon him, as she had imposed her distinctive
and delightful home upon him, regardlessly, because these things were
the natural and legitimate developments of herself?
These things were not his ends.
Had she hitherto ever really cared what his ends might be?
A phrase she had heard abundantly enough in current feminist discussion
recurred to her mind, "the economic dependence of women," and now for
the first time it was charged with meaning. She had imposed these things
upon him not because she loved him, but because these things that were
the expansions and consequences of her love for him were only obtainable
through him. A woman gives herself to a man out of love, and remains
clinging parasitically to him out of necessity. Was there no way of
evading that necessity?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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