Keggo said, “Rosalie, you’ve great ideas, and I think very shrewd and very striking ideas, about the difference between men and women, but there’s this difference I think you haven’t thought of--the danger that women carry in themselves; right in them, here”--she had a hand against her breast and she pressed it there--“born in them, inerradicable, and that men have not. Men go into dangers but they come out of them and go home to tea. That’s what it is with men, Rosalie. They can always get out. They can always come back. They never belong to a thing, body and soul and heart and mind. Rosalie, women do. That’s their danger. That’s why it is so very, very dangerous being a woman. Women can’t come back. They can’t, Rosalie. Look at me. They take to a thing and it becomes a craze, it becomes an obsession, it becomes a drug. Look at me. They take to a thing--anything; a poison like mine, or a pursuit like some one else’s, or an idea like some other’s, or a--a career in life like, like yours, Rosalie,--they take to it and go deep enough, and they’re its; they never will get away from it, they never, never will be able to come out of it. Never.” She was extraordinarily vehement. It was embarrassing for Rosalie. Rosalie desired to contest, as vehemently, these theories. She did not believe them a bit. They were founded, she felt, on the tragedy of Keggo’s own case. Keggo was unfairly, though very naturally, arguing from the particular to the general, from the personal to the abstract. But how could she reply to Keggo, “Of course you say that?” She was silent; but she betrayed perhaps her thoughts in a gesture, her difficulty in some expression of her face.