I have nothing now but my pained self again, having violently rushed at things and torn them to bits. It's all my fault from the very beginning. But I stand for something. I would dash my head against a wall rather than deny it. I make people hate me by _knowing_ them and dashing my head against the wall of their behaviour. I should never make a good chess-player. Is God a chess-player? I shan't leave until I have proved that no one can put me in a false position. There is something that is untouched by positions.... * * * * * I did not know what I had.... Friendship is fine fine porcelain. I have sent a crack right through it.... Mrs. Bailey ... numbers of people I never think of would like to have me always there.... The sky fitting down on the irregular brown vista bore an untouched life.... There were always mornings; at work. I am free to work zealously and generously with and for him. At _least_ I have broken up his confounded complacency. He will be embarrassed. _I_ shan't. CHAPTER XXII 1 ... "And at fifty, when a woman is beginning to sit down intelligently to life--behold, it is beginning to be time to take leave...." That woman was an elderly woman of the world; but a dear. She understood. She had spent her life in amongst people, having a life of her own going on all the time; looking out at something through the bars, whenever she was alone and sometimes in the midst of conversations; but no one would see it, but people who _knew_. And now she was free to step out and there was hardly any time left. But there was a little time. Women who _know_ are quite brisk at fifty. "A man must never be silent with a woman unless he wishes for the quiet development of a relationship from which there is no withdrawing ... if ordinary social intercourse cannot be kept up he must fly ... in silence a man is an open book and unarmed. In speech with a man a woman is at a disadvantage--because they speak different languages. She may understand his. Hers he will never speak nor understand. In pity, or from other motives she must therefore, stammeringly, speak his. He listens and is flattered and thinks he has her mental measure when he has not touched even the fringe of her consciousness.... Outside the life relationship men and women can have only conversational, and again conversational, interchange." ... That's the truth about life. Men and women never meet. Inside the life relationship you can see them being strangers and hostile; one or the other or both, completely alone. That was the world. Social life. In social life no one was alive but the lonely women keeping up half-admiring half-pitying endless conversations with men, with one little ironic part of themselves ... until they were fifty and had done their share of social life. But outside the world--one could be alive always. Fifty. Thirty more years....