They want to possess more. They want to possess body, soul and spirit. They want to share every thought of their beloved, every instinct, every wish, every ambition, every vision, every remotest dream. That they are forbidden this complete reciprocity by a profound law of nature excites their savage fury, and they blindly wreak their anger upon the innocent cause of their bewildered un-happiness. It is their maternal instinct which thus desires to take complete and absolute possession of the object of their love. The maternal instinct is always--as Conrad makes quite clear--at the bottom of the love-passion in the most normal types of women; and the maternal instinct is driven on by a mad relentless force to seek to destroy every vestige of separate independence, bodily, mental or spiritual, in the person it pursues. Conrad shows with extraordinary subtlety how this basic craving in women, resulting in this irrational and, apparently, inexplicable anger, is invariably driven to cover its tracks by every kind of cunning subterfuge. This loving anger of women will blaze up into flame at a thousand quite trivial causes. It may take the form of jealousy; but it is in reality much deeper than jealousy. It may take the form of protest against man's stupidity, man's greed, man's vanity, man's lust, man's thick-skinned selfishness; but it is in reality a protest against the law of nature which makes it impossible for a woman to share this stupidity, this vanity, this lust, this greed, and which holds her so cruelly confined to a selfishness which is her own and quite different from the selfishness of man. One would only have to carry the psychological imagination of Conrad a very little further to recognise the fact that while man is inherently and completely satisfied with the difference between man and woman; satisfied with it and deriving his most thrilling pleasure from it; woman is always feverishly and frantically endeavouring to overcome and overreach this difference, endeavouring, in fact, to feel her way into every nerve and fibre of man's sensibility, so that he shall have nothing left that is a secret from her. That he should have any such secrets--that such secrets should be an inalienable and inevitable part of his essential difference from herself--excites in her unmitigated fury; and this is the hidden cause of those mysterious outbursts of apparently quite irrational anger which have fallen upon all lovers of women since the beginning of the world.