“It is clear that the women aristocrats who must come to the remaking of the world will do so in spite of limitations at least as great as those from which the aristocratic spirit of man escapes. These women must become aristocratic through their own innate impulse, they must be self-called to their lives, exactly as men must be; there is no making an aristocrat without a predisposition for rule and nobility. And they have to discover and struggle against just exactly the limitations that we have to struggle against. They have to conquer not only fear but indulgence, indulgence of a softer, more insidious quality, and jealousy—proprietorship....
“It is as natural to want a mate as to want bread, and a thousand times in my work and in my wanderings I have thought of a mate and desired a mate. A mate—not a possession. It is a need almost naively simple. If only one could have a woman who thought of one and with one! Though she were on the other side of the world and busied about a thousand things....
“'WITH one,' I see it must be rather than 'OF one.' That 'of one' is just the unexpurgated egotistical demand coming back again....
“Man is a mating creature. It is not good to be alone. But mating means a mate....
“We should be lovers, of course; that goes without saying....
“And yet not specialized lovers, not devoted, ATTENDING lovers. 'Dancing attendance'—as they used to say. We should meet upon our ways as the great carnivores do....
“That at any rate was a sound idea. Though we only played with it.
“But that mate desire is just a longing that can have no possible satisfaction now for me. What is the good of dreaming? Life and chance have played a trick upon my body and soul. I am mated, though I am mated to a phantom. I loved and I love Arnanda, not Easton's Amanda, but Amanda in armour, the Amanda of my dreams. Sense, and particularly the sense of beauty, lies deeper than reason in us. There can be no mate for me now unless she comes with Amanda's voice and Amanda's face and Amanda's quick movements and her clever hands....”
24
“Why am I so ungrateful to her still for all the happiness she gave me?