this is how you have treated that revelation. . . . Why do you hint about shame to me? Did you think I shared what you call your weakness? Did you think for those moments that, as you say of yourself, I forgot or lost restraint? . . . You would not believe me if I told you that all women in their essence are the same. It is only with so many that . . . the hollow dignity of social position, the chimera of good repute . . . are more attractive and alluring than the pain and discomfort and difficulty of bringing children into a competitive world. . . . But starve one of these women . . . deny to her the first function which justifies her existence . . . and you will find her behave as I behaved. . . . I had no shame then. I loved. Loving no longer, I still now have no shame because, and believe me it is not in anger, we have no cause to meet again."
On the other hand, Miss E. M. Delafield's Humbug reveals with startling clearness the falseness of self-seeking in passion. Her argument is the more convincing because her heroine, Lily Stellenthorpe, has the best of reasons for adopting the new ideal, the strongest possible temptation to follow a false light. Her sensitive and vital nature
had been cramped from birth by "a good woman's capacity for the falsification of moral values." Her father literally drove her along the same demoralizing groove. Love and respect for their honest, but kind, goodness almost compel insincerity and the complete self-annihilation. Under such influences, she acquires a good husband. He, alas, dictates her conscience, assumes that so sweet a woman will conform to type. It seems almost a brutal sin for her to act, think, or even feel, for herself. Steadily she grows more hidden, secret, and hypocritical.
This careful preparation for modern self-passion is admirably drawn. We can scarcely deny that any sudden outburst of even cruel selfishness or revolt might be excused, if not absolutely justified, for her.
Inevitably the occasion comes. The expected lover appears, young, ardent, understanding; all, it seems to her revived free impulse, that she had been seeking for many years. Lily, however, does not snatch at happiness, flare out herself. She looks into herself, getting herself—as it were—in order, before so fateful a choice.
She thought first, as she had been told by a sympathetic schoolmistress, "What I need,
what I must have, if I am ever to fulfil myself—is romance. I must learn not to be afraid of life. Some day, I shall love. Am I to pretend to myself that such a thing is out of the question because I am married?" Why not strike for freedom, and begin life again? She "thought that the conflict lay, as so often, between sincerity and sentiment." Only sentiment made it "impossible for her to be ruthless" to her husband.
"Then illumination came to her, searing and vivid."
The lover was, after all, a mere "pretext," an opportunity for one more experiment with life, one more feverish attempt to find some false image of herself.
"Was the freedom for which she looked to be based upon yet another artificial value? After all, why should she arrogate to herself the right of deciding what her greatest happiness was to be? . . . The long, long way round that it had been, to arrive at last at her own convictions, and cease to try and wrench them into line with those of other people!"