His disappointment gives him a humanizing air of meekness. It inclines me to him. You feel intensely that other doors are open and, if you wanted to, you could knock and gain admittance.
This grim laconic man, whose ways are confined to the ways of command, who has been sterilized and handcuffed by the barren power which money confers, looks at me intently with eyes raised like a child's. Women are wrong in supposing that a man forsakes them when he renounces his desire.
I speak to him disconnectedly, but I am leading up to what I want to say. And he moves his face a little forward and still a little further forward; it's as though he were drawing closer, step by step, step by step. And everything external about me is effaced by degrees, my sunshiny hair, my mouth, my body present but concealed, my entire femininity. An infallible instinct tells me this. He takes in my voice alone, and is surprised that my voice talks nothing but sense. But he is going to know if it will talk sense straight to the end, so he settles himself more comfortably in his armchair, lets his eyebrows relax, and loses all thought of himself. His logic is being appealed to.
"Now as to your money ... you know if I married you it would not be for your love.... Your money?... It doesn't count? You're right, it doesn't count.... I might not have discovered it at once. I might have said, as I did the other day, that I don't love you. I might also have thought of my aversion to the idea of marriage. Don't look like that. Marriage as it is to-day is immoral and stupid. Don't say my marriage was perfect. The man I lost was a rare soul. For ordinary people like you and me marriage brings nothing but misfortune and mediocrity.
"To marry is to lie, to deceive both yourself and the other one; and when a man and a woman harbor infinite hopes, when they look out upon perpetually changing horizons, when they have the choice of all the roads in the world, and the whole of life spreads out before them, it is absurd to suppose that they can ever subject themselves to each other.
"You marry, you pledge your soul, you promise your flesh. Once imprisoned, you maim yourself, and should the call of love some day become too strong, what other alternative than to lie or break the chains? Deceit or catastrophe; there is no choice. Love does not reconcile the primitive hatred between man and woman: on the contrary, it sharpens it; and for two people to venture upon the impossible enterprise of joining together two opposite destinies the full length of their courses, requires a spirit that neither you nor I possess, a spirit greater than nature bestows; it also takes the intellect of a God. I assure you it does....
"Perhaps you would have waited till the very end to bring out your trump argument. But I would have rejected your seductive words angrily. They would not be to the point. The point is, that if I were to become your wife, my lot would be as I have described it.
"You lean forward, you approve what I say.
"The simple fact is, I couldn't live. There would be no use my trying. I should not have the strength every day to witness a real death unless I had the tiredness and the sort of forgiveness that come from hard work. I simply couldn't eat with appetite, I couldn't sleep in peace.
"And in the morning, if I did not know that this exultation, this unruly vigor, this swarming of scattered inclinations could not be controlled, dammed and curbed by laws ... no, I would not dare to begin to live again....