"For mercy's sake don't brag about your experiences!" said Hilda. "I've never met the man yet who was capable of intimacy with a woman, giving himself up to her. That was what I wanted. I'm not keen on their self-satisfied tenderness, and their sensuality. I'm not content to be any man's little petsywetsy, nor his chair à plaisir either. I wanted a complete intimacy, and I didn't get it. That's enough for me."
Connie pondered this. Complete intimacy! She supposed that meant revealing everything concerning yourself to the other person, and his revealing everything concerning himself. But that was a bore. And all that weary self-consciousness between a man and a woman! a disease!
"I think you're too conscious of yourself all the time, with everybody," she said to her sister.
"I hope at least I haven't a slave nature," said Hilda.
"But perhaps you have! Perhaps you are a slave to your own idea of yourself."
Hilda drove in silence for some time after this piece of unheard-of insolence from that chit Connie.
"At least I'm not a slave to somebody else's idea of me: and the somebody else a servant of my husband's," she retorted at last, in crude anger.
"You see, it's not so," said Connie calmly.
She had always let herself be dominated by her elder sister. Now, though somewhere inside herself she was weeping, she was free of the dominion of other women. Ah! that in itself was a relief, like being given another life: to be free of the strange dominion and obsession of other women. How awful they were, women!
She was glad to be with her father, whose favourite she had always been. She and Hilda stayed in a little hotel off Pall Mall, and Sir Malcolm was in his club. But he took his daughters out in the evening, and they liked going with him.