"But I know and I care, and I want to keep the memory of it. I don't mind it's being darkened by circumstances, if it must be, but I do mind it's being spoiled by our own weakness. Men are always girding at women for caring about nothing but love. They may gird fairly when we are untrue to love and let men belittle it with their impatience and arrogance. I ought not to say that to you, because you have tried, and I have done nothing but argue with myself." "I think you have found something which I have not even begun to see." "And argued about it." "I don't see what else you could do." Cathleen thrust silently at the fire and said savagely: "Oh! don't you? I thought I was going to be so free with my two hundred pounds. Free, to do what? Walk in suffrage processions, break windows, insult policemen. I was free to do what I liked, but I liked nothing very much. I was too fastidious and could not take what came. Things did come. They lacked this or that necessary for my satisfaction. When my money was gone I had to creep into shelter away from the freedom I did not know how to use, and ask for work to keep myself alive, just like the girls and women in this house, who keep themselves alive for nothing, so far as I can see, except the pleasure of being tired and bored and malicious. I was in a bad way, René, when I met you. I used to go to Rachel, who is the only one of the family who will have anything to do with me, and sometimes I envied her in her stupid, unhappy comfort. She doesn't get on with her husband, but she has a nice house and two children who alternately infuriate and amuse her. That was impossible for me. I'd hate it, just living with a man to keep a household together. But then even now I've hated the alternative I had arrived at, this being huddled away with a lot of useless women. Working women! A genteel occupation to support a genteel existence. The selfishness of it! People like to pretend that motherhood solves everything for a woman. It may give occupation to a dependent woman, but why should it destroy her selfishness any more than another physical fact? If she insists on it too much, it cannot do anything but accentuate her selfishness. Women can be just as greedy about motherhood as about eating or drinking or love, and they can just as easily spoil it with overindulgence. Don't look so unhappy, René. I'm not arguing with you. I've had to think so much, and for months I haven't had a soul to talk to like this. Even Lotta has her world so shaped and trim (she's efficient, you see) that all my doubts and wonderings are just an annoyance to her, though no one could be kinder. I don't know what I should have done without her. It was such a comfort to find a woman working really well, without insisting that hers is the only way of living, and doing good without wanting to be thankful for it. She made me patient. When you have decided what you do not wish to do, you are apt to think anything different must be better.