“Or say all I mean.”
Valeria laid her hand on Hadria’s with wistful tenderness.
“I don’t think anyone will ever quite understand you, Hadria.”
“Including perhaps myself. I sometimes fancy that when it became necessary to provide me with a disposition, the material had run out, for the moment, nothing being left but a few remnants of other people’s characters; so a living handful of these was taken up, roughly welded together, and then the mixture was sent whirling into space, to boil and sputter itself out as best it might.”
Miss Du Prel turned to her companion.
“I see that you are incongruously situated, but don’t you think that you may be wrong yourself? Don’t you think you may be making a mistake?”
Hadria was emphatic in assent.
“Not only do I think I may be wrong, but I don’t see how—unless by pure chance—I can be anything else. For I can’t discover what is right. I see women all round me actuated by this frenzied sense of duty; I see them toiling submissively at their eternal treadmill; occupying their best years in the business of filling their nurseries; losing their youth, narrowing their intelligence, ruining their husbands, and clouding their very moral sense at last. Well, I know that such conduct is supposed to be right and virtuous. But I can’t see it. It impresses me simply as stupid and degrading. And from my narrow little point of observation, the more I see of life, the more hopelessly involved become all questions of right and wrong where our confounded sex is concerned.”
“Why? Because the standards are changing,” asserted Miss Du Prel.
“Because—look, Valeria, our present relation to life is in itself an injury, an insult—you have never seriously denied that—and how can one make for oneself a moral code that has to lay its foundation-stone in that very injury? And if one lays one’s foundation-stone in open ground beyond, then one’s code is out of touch with present fact, and one’s morality consists in sheer revolt all along the line. The whole matter is in confusion. You have to accept Mrs. Walker’s and Mrs. Gordon’s view of the case, plainly and simply, or you get off into a sort of morass and blunder into quicksands.”