"Oh, my dear!"
"I mean it in the big sense. Vulgar means common to all—to all people. So I say life is vulgar ... and the longing for freedom is vulgar. No one has ever longed for freedom as slaves have, I suppose. Well, I am a slave ... and I long for freedom. I long for it so that I want it quickly. I want it as one wants water when one's famishing, and bread when one's starving. I'm not so aristocratic in my hunger and thirst that I prefer to wait through dignified years for a bit of stale bread. I want my loaf now ... and I want the whole loaf ... not half...."
Sophy was indeed speaking with "vulgar" intensity. She "let herself go" because she wanted Joe and Charlotte to understand once for all that there was no use in trying to make her behave "reasonably."
Charlotte's small mouth was tight shut. The Judge looked rather pale. Just as he had thought, Sophy was evincing rashness in its most aggravated form.
XXXVIII
Sophy slipped down from her perch on the window-sill, and came and stood between them.
"Oh, Chartie ... Joe...." she said, turning from one to the other, "why do you look so? Surely you don't want me to waste long years of my life, clanking this chain after me, wherever I go?... Not free ... not a wife ... not anything really—and Morris in the same plight!... And Belinda.... Think of that wild, self-willed girl...."
"You're crazy, Sophy!... You really talk as if you were crazy!..." broke in Charlotte, suffocated. "How can you mention that ... that...." Propriety prevented Charlotte from expressing herself fully. ".... That creature?" she ended, breathing very short. "How can you care what becomes of her?"
Sophy looked tired all at once. She dropped into a chair near the desk.