10. She sat for a while absorbed in her own thoughts. Knowing her as I did, I understood what intense emotions were seething within her, what a terrific struggle her decision must have represented. “Dear Friend,” she said, suddenly, “don’t think I haven’t seen his side of the case. I try to tell myself that I dealt with him frankly from the beginning. But then I ask was there ever a man I dealt with frankly? There was coquetry in the very clothes I wore! And now that we are so entangled, now that he loves me, what is my duty? I find I can’t respect his love for me. A part of it is because my beauty fascinates him, but more of it seems to me just wounded vanity. I was the only woman who ever flouted him, and he has a kind of snobbery that made him think I must be something remarkable because of it. I talked that all out with him--yes, I’ve dragged him through all that humiliation. I wanted to make him see that he didn’t really love me, that he only wanted to conquer me, to force me to admire him and submit to him. I want to be myself, and he wants to be himself--that has always been the issue between us.” “That is the issue in many unhappy marriages,” I said. “I’ve done a lot of thinking in the last year,” she resumed--“about things generally, I mean. We American women think we are so free. That is because our husbands indulge us, give us money, and let us run about. But when it comes to real freedom--freedom of intellect and of character, English women are simply another kind of being from us. I met a cabinet minister’s wife--he’s a Conservative in everything, and she’s an ardent suffragist; she not merely gives money, she makes speeches and has a public name. Yet they are friends, and have a happy home-life. Do you suppose my husband would consider such an arrangement?” “I thought he admired English ways,” I said. “There was the Honorable Betty Annersley--the sister of a chum of his. She was friendly with the militants, and I wanted to talk to her to understand what such women thought. Yet my husband tried to stop me from going to see her. And it’s the same way with everything I try to do, that threatens to take me out of his power. He wanted me to accept the authority of the doctors as to any possible danger from venereal disease. When I got the books, and showed him what the doctors admitted about the question--the narrow margin of safety they allowed, the terrible chances they took--he was angry again.” She stopped, seeing a question in my eyes. “I’ve been reading up on the subject,” she explained. “I know it all now--the things I should have known before I married.” “How did you manage that?”