Meanwhile, the home, Peter’s home, demanded immediate attention. She really must get rid of Fry, Fry came later and later of a morning, left earlier and earlier of an evening, Fry overfed the animals, Fry hadn’t yet finished his seed-potato-sorting. . . . Thought became gloriously inconsecutive. . . . One oughtn’t to keep three servants. The children would have to go to school. The Lowndes Square purchase money wouldn’t last for ever. It was very good of Peter to have given her the Lowndes Square money. Peter always had been very good to her. . . . By this time, she had circled Arlsfield Village, was beyond the Post Office. In front of her, the boundary road of Arlsfield Hall serpentined under leafless chestnuts. Still lost in thought, Patricia wandered on. Peter’s mistress! Why mistress? What did a mistress give that wife couldn’t? Ridiculous! She smiled to herself. Give! What couldn’t she give to a man if only. . . There are certain moments in the life of every woman, when the sex-antagonism disappears and she realizes the sex-necessity. Such a moment came to Patricia as she tramped sturdily along the leaf-sodden road that late-December afternoon of nineteen hundred and sixteen. Hitherto, she had been content to regard the sex-intimacies as rather shameful necessities of married life. The man desired; the woman gave way to his desires. Her own desires, the secret pleasure she sometimes experienced in giving way to him, were of those savage hordes, the instincts, which Reason—very reasonably—did its utmost to suppress: Bedroom thoughts, in fact. Bedroom thoughts! Suddenly she saw the absurdity of the phrase. If love meant anything at all, it meant mutuality; and mutuality could not exclude sex-instinct. Why should woman be ashamed of her desires? Bedroom thoughts—indeed. Absurd mock-modesty! Rubbish! Stuff and Nonsense! Early Victorianism at its soppiest extreme! . . . And the woman of thirty tramped on. It was her moment of matehood: in that moment, she forgot her two children, her reduced income, her husband’s illness; realized nothing except this new and to her amazing truth—that the sex-need was mutual. There came over her a great mood of clairvoyance. The word “mistress” no longer puzzled, no longer frightened. By her love, she interpreted the meaning of it: by her love, she saw the sex-thing whole. It sufficed not that a wife surrendered her body grudgingly, even though she became her husband’s pal, his childbearer, the manager of his home and the partner of his income. Marriage, to be perfect, required more than these. They twain must be one flesh, one in mutual desire as they were one in mutual interest. And in clean desire, love sanctifying, could be no shame. Matehood-moment still on her, Patricia rounded the last bend of the road; sighted the mellow straggling roof of Francis Gordon’s cottage above the leafless elder-hedges.