She got up. “Come over here to me, Harry.”
He went to her and took the hands that she extended to him. “If you think that, a disaster, and if to you it would be what you said, a blow; then that’s what I mean by saying, Harry, you look out for yourself. I don’t know if I’m going back. I want to go terribly, oh, terribly. There was a woman I once knew told me that if a woman once gives herself to a thing, abandons all else and gives herself to it, she never never can come back from it. ‘They don’t issue return tickets to women,’ she said to me. ‘If you give yourself,’ she said, ‘you’re its. You may think you can get away but you never will get away. You’re its.’ She was right, Harry. I believe I’ve got to go back. If you don’t want me to, well, you look out for yourself.” She drew herself towards him by her hands. “Harry, when I went down to Field’s with the children that day last holidays I took them to be a bodyguard to me, to prevent me from being captured. When they left me there alone for a few minutes, I turned away and wrung my hands because I knew I was going to be terribly tempted. I am terribly tempted. I’m being dragged.” She went into his arms. “Harry, hold me terribly tight and say you don’t want me to go back.”
He most tenderly embraced her. “Don’t go back, Rosalie.”
She disengaged herself, and made a sound, “Ah!” as if, while he had held her body, herself had held the fort of her solicitude for his desires against the horde of her own cravings that swarmed about its walls.
How long?
There was a mirage in her face. While Easter came and Doda, in huge spirits, made her start at school, and Huggo, boisterously elated, his start at Tidborough, and Benji, much dejected at Doda’s going, his start at Huggo’s former day school; and while the long summer term and the holidays passed on, there was never again seen nor heard by Harry the tenderness that had been in her face and in her voice when she had warned him, “Well, Harry, you look out for yourself,” and when she had asked him, “Harry, hold me terribly tight in your arms and say you do not want me to go back.” There thenceforward did fill up her countenance the boy, mutinous and defiant, that was her other self. It was almost upon the morrow of that passage with him (whose poignancy the written word has failed to show) that she had a revulsion from the attitude she had then exposed to him. Avid now to go back to the life she had abandoned, she was ferocious to herself when she remembered she had asked him, “Would it be a crime, Harry, to go back?” A crime! “Horrible traitor to myself that I was” (her thoughts would go) “to question it a crime just to take up my life again! A crime! Horrible fool that I was to be able, with no sense of humour, to give to so natural a desire an epithet so ludicrous as crime! A crime! A right, a right!”
Worst of all, she had invited, she had implored, Harry when her longings were manifest to reason with her. Her longings now always were manifest; but when he reasoned with her it was out of the scorpions of her revulsion that she answered him.
He once said, “It appears to me that your attitude is changed from the night you first mentioned this.”
She said, “Harry, what’s disturbing me when we talk about it is not my own case, it’s the general case. Here’s a woman—never mind that it’s me—here’s a woman that has made a success in life, that has abandoned it and that wants to go back to it. You argue she mustn’t. I could say it’s monstrous. I don’t say that. I choose to say it’s pitiful. If it was a man, he’d go. He wouldn’t think twice about it. And if he did think twice about it, every opinion and every custom that he consulted would tell him he was right to go. It happens to be a woman, therefore—well, that’s the reason! It’s a woman—therefore, No. That’s the beginning of the reason and the end of the reason. A woman—therefore, No. Oh, it’s pitiful—for women.”
Harry questioned: “Every opinion and every custom would tell a man to go? No, no. You’re taking too much for granted, Rosalie. He wouldn’t go, necessarily, and he wouldn’t be advised to go, if he had duties that pulled him the other way.”