"You _know_ we can't; you _know_ how separate we are. You have seen it again and again and agreed. You see it now; only you are carried away by this man's first impression. Quite a wrong one. I know the sort of woman he means. Who accepts a man's idea and leaves him to go about his work undisturbed; sure that her attention is distracted from his full life by practical preoccupations. It's _perfectly_ easy to create that impression, on any man. Of bright complacency. All the busy married women are creating it all the time, helplessly. Men see them looking out into the world, practical, responsible, quite certain about everything, going from thing to thing, too active amongst things to notice men's wavering self-indulgence, their slips and shams. Men lean and feed and are kept going, and in their moments of gratitude they laud women to the skies. At other moments, amongst themselves, they call them materialists, animals, half-human, imperfectly civilised creatures of instinct, sacrificed to sex. And all the time they have no suspicion of the individual life going on behind the surface." ... To marry would be actually to become, as far as the outside world could see, exactly the creature men described. To go into complete solitude, marked for life as a segregated female whose whole range of activities was known; in the only way men have of knowing things. "Lintoff of course is not quite like that. But then in these revolutionary circles men and women live the same lives.... It's like America in the beginning, where women were as valuable as men in the outside life. If the revolution were accomplished they would separate again." ... She backed to the railings behind her, and leant, with a heel on the low moulding, to steady herself against the tide of thought, leaving Michael planted in the middle of the pavement. A policeman strolled up, narrowly observing them, and passed on. "No one on earth knows whether these Russian revolutionaries are right or wrong. But they have a thing that none of their sort of people over here have--an effortless sense of humanity as one group. The _men_ have it and are careless about everything else. I believe they think it worth realising if everybody in the world died at the moment of realisation. The women know that humanity is two groups. And they go into revolutions for the freedom from the pressure of this knowledge." "Revolution is by no means the sole way of having a complete sense of humanity. But what has all this to do with _us_?" "It is not that the women are heartless; that is an appearance. It is that they know that there are no _tragedies_...." "Listen, Mira. You have taught me much. I am also perhaps not so indiscriminating as are some men." "In family life, all your Jewish feelings would overtake you. You would slip into dressing-gown and slippers. You have said so yourself. But I am now quite convinced that I shall never marry." She walked on.