Of her sisters, reproaching her, she declares "Jane thinks herself a true woman just because she's clung to modesty and chastity and a fierce reserve; but these things are only of true value when they're needed, and what man has needed them of us? Who cares at all
whether we've been chaste or pure? None but ourselves! And what made us care but those false values that make Jane's shame of me? . . . You're not really ashamed of me. You're envious, jealous, and you're stung with spite. Calling me a servant girl or a woman of the streets only feeds your spite, it doesn't satisfy your heart. You'd give all you know to have what I have. . . . I'm going to have a child. . . . It's not a sin. It's not a shame. It's the most wonderful thing in the world."
There is one unanswerable reply to that fearful charge—"What man has needed chastity of us, who cares?"—a son's honouring of his mother, the man's instinct to defend his wife, his sister, or his child.
False, or forced, "modesty" may degenerate into "spite"; but it will be a sad day for human nature when all women are "jealous" of the "free!"
Mr. Thurston seems to claim, in this novel, to be "the one man in the world who understands the truth about women." This is his reading of truth!
It had been "the one night of her lover's life"; but he went back to that "wonderful woman," his wife, who had "as big a heart as all this stretch of acres and that breadth of
sea." To Mary, he wrote, "I blame myself utterly and I blame myself alone. . . . So many another woman would have reckoned the cost before she knew the full account. You said nothing. You are wonderful, Mary, and if any woman deserves to escape the consequences of passion, it is you."
"God!" she cried, "was that the little mind her own had met with? . . . She knew how in the deepest recesses of her soul there did not live a father to her child. . . . If this was a man, then men were nothing to women. Two nights of burning passion he had been with her and for those moments they had been inseparably one. But now he had gone as though the whole world divided them. . . . With that letter he had cancelled all existence in the meaning of life. There was no meaning in him."
He was "the mere servant of Nature, whipped with passion to her purpose . . . no father at all."
Wherefore she tries to explain to him: "Women are not complicated. It is only the laws that make us appear so. . . . That first of our two nights on the cliffs, did you find me complicated or difficult of understanding? I showed, as well as gave you myself, and