“But it is inside people that it happens like that. False people have their souls eaten away with lies, and true people have free, happy souls like yours. Being rich or poor, or what you call good or bad, has nothing to do with it. Yes. It is inside people that it happens like that, and I am more often the villain than the hero inside myself.”
“It seems absurd to me, and I can’t think why you should take it seriously.”
“It is because you are so idiotically good. You have only one side to your nature. You are like a heroine in your Dickens.”
“I’m not. I’m sure I’m not. I’m bad-tempered and mean and unjust.”
“You don’t even know how bad I am. You have no more idea of what my life is like than a rose has of an onion’s.”
“I don’t like onions.”
“That’s the trouble. You don’t like the smell of onions, and so you don’t eat them. Very poor people live on bread and onions and they find them good. I have no patience with you. You want to be a rose growing in a sheltered English garden.”
“I don’t. I don’t want anything of the kind.”
“A wild rose, then; and you have no right to want such a life. You are not a flower. You are a human being, and you can’t have a sheltered life, or a summer hedgerow life, because you have truth and falsehood in you, and if you will not live for the truth you will die for the falsehood. That is why cinemas are good and theatres are rotten. All the plays are false, because they have forgotten truth and falsehood and are all about being rich or poor, or old or young, or married or unmarried, and in the worst plays of all they are about people pretending to be children so as to get out of the whole thing. I hate you sometimes when you seem to be trying that game of refusing to be grown up, denying your own feelings and letting men love you and pretending you don’t know what it is all about.”