“I’m not sure what you do mean. It seems to me we’re actually childish. You’ve chosen, quite deliberately, to be a reactionary in all this woman’s progress movement. I’m sorry. But there is a loyalty one has to women, Gage, beside the loyalty one has to a husband and I really cannot share your prejudice against progress, as it applies to women.” The unexpressed things in Gage’s mind fairly tore at him. “If you really had one sensible objection, Gage--” “There’s just one objection,” he said, doggedly, “you desecrate yourself. Not by entering politics particularly. But by using yourself that way. You mutilate your sex.” She did not get angry. But she put one hand on his shoulder and they looked at each other helplessly. “Don’t you see,” said Helen, “that I want, like these other women, to once in a while do something that’s clean of sex? That’s just me--without sex?” His eyes grew very hard. She struck almost mortally at the very thing he loved most. And he moved away, as if to remove himself definitely. “I’m sorry you feel so. It’s a pleasant remark for a man’s wife to fling at him.” Irony was so unusual in Gage that Helen stood looking after him after he went out of the room. Her mind ached with the struggle, ached from the assertion of this new determination of hers. Never had she wanted so to give him comfort and be comforted herself. She saw the weeks ahead--weeks of estrangement--possibly a permanent estrangement. Yet she knew she would go on. It wasn’t just wanting to go on. She had to go on. There was a principle involved even if he could not see it. Clearer and clearer she had seen her necessity in these past two weeks. She had to waken her own individuality. She had to live to herself alone for a little. She had to begin to build defences against sex. Gage was right. Margaret had sown the seed in his wife. Helen had not watched her for nothing. She had seen the way that Margaret made no concessions to herself as a woman, fiercely as she was working for the establishment of woman’s position. It seemed paradoxical but there it was. If you were truly to work for woman’s welfare you had to abandon all the cushions of woman’s protected position, thought Helen--you couldn’t rest back on either wifehood or motherhood. You couldn’t be lazy. You had to make yourself fully yourself. Here was her chance. She hadn’t wanted it but they had insisted. The women wanted her to go to Chicago--not because she was Mrs. Flandon but because she was Helen Flandon, herself. A little quiver of delight ran through Helen as she thought of it. She would see it through. Gage would surely not persist in his feeling. Surely he would change. He would be glad when she proved more than just his wife.