Eve told herself that there were exceptions, but that society, in the mass, moved along these lines. She had listened to Kate Duveen—Kate Duveen, who was a fanatic, and who had made it her business to look into the conditions under which working women lived. The shop-girl, the servant, the waitress, the clerk, the typist, the chorus-girl, the street-walker; always they held in their hands the bribe that men desired, that bribe so fatal to the woman when once it had been given. Eve began to understand the spirit of revolt by the disgust that was stirred in her own heart. This huge sexual machine. This terrible, primitive groundwork upon which all the shades of civilisation were tagged like threads of coloured silk. There was some resemblance here between the reaction of certain women against sex, and the reaction of the early Christians against the utter physical smell of the Roman civilisation. To live, one must be born again. One must triumph over the senses. One must refuse to treat with men on the old physical understanding. They are the cries of extremists, and yet of an extremity that hopes to triumph by urging a passionate and protesting celibacy. A million odd women in the United Kingdom, over-setting the sex balance, and clamouring, many of them, that they will not be weighed in the old sexual scale. Eve caught the spirit of rebellion, divorced as she was from any comradeship with men. It is so much easier to quarrel with the hypothetical antagonists whom one meets in the world of one’s own brain. Bring two prejudiced humans together, get them to talk like reasonable beings, and each may have some chance of discovering that the other is not the beast that he or she had imagined. It is when masses of people segregate and refuse to mix that war becomes more than probable. Insensibly, yet very surely, Eve began to imbibe this feeling of antagonism. It made her take sides, even when she happened to read the account of some law case in the paper. And this tacit antagonism abetted her in her refusal to accept the cheap labour that society, “male society,” she called it, chose to offer her. It behoved women to stand out against male exploitation, even if they had to suffer for the moment. Yet her revolt was still an individual revolt. She had not joined herself to the crowd. She wanted to complete her personal experiences before associating herself with the great mass of discontent, and she meant to go through to the end—to touch all the realities. Perhaps she was a little feverish in her sincerity. She had been ill. She had been badly fed. She had been worried, and she was in a mood that demanded that specious sort of realism that is to the truth what a statue is to the living body.