He said with a sudden animation, “Look here, let’s take it on that level, Rosalie. In your case what’s the need? Call it dominion. I’ve never exercised nor thought to exercise dominion over you.” “But you’ve not understood, Harry. I gave up what was my life to me. To you I’d only--chucked it. Oh, but that hurt! That man’s supreme indifference, that is dominion.” He said, “I’ll know it, dearest, for your sacrifice.” She put out a hand as if to hold that word away. “Oh, trust not that. They talk of the ennoblement of sacrifice. Ah, do not believe it. It can go too long, too far, and then like wine too long matured... just acid, Harry. I never said a bitter thing to you until--thus sacrificing. It is the kennel dog again. If I went on I’d grow more bitter yet, more bitter and more bitter. It’s why women are so much more bitter than men. It’s what they’ve sacrificed. I’m going back, Harry. I’ve got to. You ask me if I’ve thought of everything. I have; but even if I had not this outrides it all. I have gone too far. She was right, that woman I told you of, who said that for a woman, once she has given herself to a thing, there is no comeback from it. I have tried. It is not to be done.” There was a very long silence. She said, “It’s settled, Harry.” He said, “Nothing’s been said, Rosalie, that gets over what I have said. There’s no home here while both of us are working. I have a right to a home. The children have a right to a home. Nothing gets over that.” She answered, “Then, Harry, give yourself a home. Give the children a home.” He said, “I am a man.” She answered, “I am a woman.” CHAPTER III The thing goes now at a most frightful pace for Rosalie. One hates the slow, laborious written word that tries to show it. There needs a pen with wings or that by leaping violence of script, by characters blotched, huge and run together, would symbolise the pace at which the thing now goes. There’s no procession of the days. Immersed in work or lost in pleasure, there never is procession of the days, so hurtling fast goes life. They crowd. They’re driven past like snow across a window pane. The calendar astounds. It is the first of the month, and lo, it is the tenth. It’s the sixteenth--half gone!--while yet it scarcely had begun; a day after the twentieth is the date; it’s next the twenty-fifth; it’s next--the month has gone.... The month! It is a season that has flown. Here’s Summer where only yesterday the buds of Spring; here’s Winter, coming--gone!--while yet the leaves seem falling. It was like that the thing now went with Rosalie. They call it a race. It isn’t a race, living like that. It’s a pursuit. Engaged in it, you’re not in rivalry, you are in flight. You’re fleeing all the time the reckoning; and he’s a sulky savage, forced to halt to gather up what you have shed, ordered to pause to note the things that you have missed, and at each duty cutting notches in a stick. That is his tally which, come up, he will present to you.