“Have women no pride?”
Henriette did not answer.
“Have they no sense of dignity? If one marries (accepting things on the usual basis, of course) one gives to another person rights and powers over one’s life that are practically boundless. To retain one’s self-direction in case of dispute would be possible only on pain of social ruin. I have little enough freedom now, heaven knows; but if I married, why my very thoughts would become the property of another. Thought, emotion, love itself, must pass under the yoke! There would be no nook or corner entirely and indisputably my own.”
“I should not regard that as a hardship,” said Henriette, “if I loved my husband.”
“I should consider it not only a hardship, but beyond endurance.”
“But, my dear, you are impracticable.”
“That is what I think domestic life is!” Hadria’s quiet tone was suddenly changed to one of scorn. “You talk of love; what has love worthy of the name to do with this preposterous interference with the freedom of another person? If that is what love means—the craving to possess and restrain and demand and hamper and absorb, and generally make mincemeat of the beloved object, then preserve me from the master-passion.”
Henriette was baffled. “I don’t know how to make you see this in a truer light,” she said. “There is something to my mind so beautiful in the close union of two human beings, who pledge themselves to love and honour one another, to face life hand in hand, to share every thought, every hope, to renounce each his own wishes for the sake of the other.”
“That sounds very elevating; in practice it breeds Mr. and Mrs. Gordon.”
“Do you mean to tell me you will never marry on this account?”