It took some days for this phase to pass, and it left some scars and something like a decision. “Violence won’t do it,” said Ann Veronica. “Begin violence, and the woman goes under....
“But all the rest of our case is right.... Yes.”
As the long, solitary days wore on, Ann Veronica found a number of definite attitudes and conclusions in her mind.
One of these was a classification of women into women who are and women who are not hostile to men. “The real reason why I am out of place here,” she said, “is because I like men. I can talk with them. I’ve never found them hostile. I’ve got no feminine class feeling. I don’t want any laws or freedoms to protect me from a man like Mr. Capes. I know that in my heart I would take whatever he gave....
“A woman wants a proper alliance with a man, a man who is better stuff than herself. She wants that and needs it more than anything else in the world. It may not be just, it may not be fair, but things are so. It isn’t law, nor custom, nor masculine violence settled that. It is just how things happen to be. She wants to be free — she wants to be legally and economically free, so as not to be subject to the wrong man; but only God, who made the world, can alter things to prevent her being slave to the right one.
“And if she can’t have the right one?
“We’ve developed such a quality of preference!”
She rubbed her knuckles into her forehead. “Oh, but life is difficult!” she groaned. “When you loosen the tangle in one place you tie a knot in another.... Before there is any change, any real change, I shall be dead — dead — dead and finished — two hundred years!...”
Part 5
One afternoon, while everything was still, the wardress heard her cry out suddenly and alarmingly, and with great and unmistakable passion, “Why in the name of goodness did I burn that twenty pounds?”
Part 6
She sat regarding her dinner. The meat was coarse and disagreeably served.
“I suppose some one makes a bit on the food,” she said....
“One has such ridiculous ideas of the wicked common people and the beautiful machinery of order that ropes them in. And here are these places, full of contagion!
“Of course, this is the real texture of life, this is what we refined secure people forget. We think the whole thing is straight and noble at bottom, and it isn’t. We think if we just defy the friends we have and go out into the world everything will become easy and splendid. One doesn’t realize that even the sort of civilization one has at Morningside Park is held together with difficulty. By policemen one mustn’t shock.
“This isn’t a world for an innocent girl to walk about in. It’s a world of dirt and skin diseases and parasites. It’s a world in which the law can be a stupid pig and the police-stations dirty dens. One wants helpers and protectors — and clean water.
“Am I becoming reasonable or am I being tamed?
“I’m simply discovering that life is many-sided and complex and puzzling. I thought one had only to take it by the throat.
“It hasn’t GOT a throat!”
Part 7
One day the idea of self-sacrifice came into her head, and she made, she thought, some important moral discoveries.
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