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... “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....