“Freedom?” He glared at her. “I shall begin to think that you wish you had never married me.”
“I should only wish that if I were made to feel that you shut me up in a house and couldn’t trust me to go where I chose. Suppose the thought took you that you would go and walk about the City some afternoon, and you wished to go alone, just to be more at ease, should I have a right to forbid you, or grumble at you? And yet you are very dissatisfied if I wish to go anywhere alone.”
“But here’s the old confusion. I am a man; you are a woman.”
“I can’t see that that makes any difference. A woman ought to go about just as freely as a man. I don’t think it’s just. When I have done my work at home I think I ought to be every bit as free as you are—every bit as free. And I’m sure, Edmund, that love needs freedom if it is to remain love in truth.”
He looked at her keenly.
“That’s a dreadful thing for you to say. So, if I disapprove of your becoming the kind of woman that acknowledges no law, you will cease to love me?”
“What law do you mean?”
“Why, the natural law that points out a woman’s place, and”—he added, with shaken voice—“commands her to follow her husband’s guidance.”
“Now you are angry. We mustn’t talk about it any more just now.”
She rose and poured out a glass of water. Her hand trembled as she drank. Widdowson fell into gloomy abstraction. Later, as they lay side by side, he wished to renew the theme, but Monica would not talk; she declared herself too sleepy, turned her back to him, and soon slept indeed.