“Despised and rejected of men,” she said to Miss Salmon, holding forth in their bedroom on her subject. “That’s what I call them. Despised and rejected of men. Oh, don’t hum louder than ever. It’s not irreverent to say that. It describes a condition, that’s all, and I’m using it because it describes this condition, their condition, exactly. It does. You can hum; but it does. They’ve never done anything, they’ve never meant to do anything, they’ve never tried to do anything except hang round after some man. That’s all. They’ve either caught him and now lost him; or they’ve missed him and now go on missing him. That’s their lives. That’s nearly any woman’s life. It’s not going to be mine. If anything were wanted to make the whole idea of marriage and all that repulsive to me--and nothing is wanted--that would. Despised and rejected of men! I used to think and to say I intended to be like a man and to do a man’s work and have a man’s share. I tell you that even getting so close to a man as that--I mean as close as intentional emulation of him--even getting as close as that makes me feel sick now. It’s my own life I’m going to have, my own place, my own share; not modelled on any one else’s. If it were conceivable that I ever met a man I cared tuppence about--but it isn’t conceivable; that’s a quality that’s been left clean out of me, thank goodness--but if it were conceivable, what I’d offer would be just to share; to go on living my own way and he his--Oh, your humming! I mean after marriage, of course; I think this free-love business they talk about is even more detestable than the lawful kind--just animalism. That’s all I’d do. Me my life; he his life; meeting, as equals, when it was convenient to meet. I’d like to bring all these poets and people who write about love into our dining-room to see those people. That’d teach them! Man’s love is of his life a thing apart; ‘Tis woman’s whole existence. What an existence!” “Well, now--” (gulp). CHAPTER VII “You have pretended to dislike and to despise men, but it was a pretence to deceive me and you are a liar.” This was the astounding opening of an astounding letter, pages and pages, to Rosalie from Miss Salmon. Pages and pages, having the appearance, each one, of a battlefield or of a riot: a welter of thick, black underscores strewn about like coffins or like corpses, and a bristling pin-cushionful (black pins) of notes of exclamation leaping about like war-dancing Zulus or staggering about like drunken or like wounded men. A welter you had to pick your way through with epithets rushing against you at every step like units of a surging mob hounding and charging against an unfortunate pedestrian caught in the trouble.