“So!” he said, smiling. “You are angry again!”
“It’s not so simple,” she said. “There is a conflict in me. And you won’t let me go away for a time.”
“We can’t even prevent you,” he said.
“Yes, but you are against my going—you don’t let me go in peace.”
“Why must you go?” he said.
“I must,” she said. “I must go back to my children, and my mother.”
“It is a necessity in you?” he said.
“Yes!”
The moment she had admitted the necessity, she realised it was a certain duplicity in herself. It was as if she had two selves: one, a new one, which belonged to Cipriano and to Ramón, and which was her sensitive, desirous self: the other hard and finished, accomplished, belonging to her mother, her children, England, her whole past. This old accomplished self was curiously invulnerable and insentient, curiously hard and “free.” In it, she was an individual and her own mistress. The other self was vulnerable, and organically connected with Cipriano, even with Ramón and Teresa, and so was not “free” at all.
She was aware of a duality in herself, and she suffered from it. She could not definitely commit herself, either to the old way of life, or to the new. She reacted from both. The old was a prison, and she loathed it. But in the new way she was not her own mistress at all, and her egoistic will recoiled.