“And being a woman . . .”
Barbara laid her hand over my lips:
“Shall I say it for you? ‘Being a woman, you don’t know what you do want.’ It’s quite true, even though all the Oakleighs in history have said it. I know you so much better than you know me.”
“And better than you know yourself?”
“I know myself better than I can explain myself. Women feel so much more and express so much less than men. Words are clumsy. When a man frames a sentence, he imagines he is shewing a thought to the world; a woman feels that the thought is being imprisoned, perhaps mutilated.” . . .
“Do you know why you married me?,” I asked.
Before she could answer, Barbara stared long at the fire.
“Yes. But I’ve never put it in words. I couldn’t now. I wasn’t in love with you, but you gave me something that I needed. . . . Women marry sometimes because they’re frightened of themselves. Sonia did. And I remember how my beloved aunts gloated over Jack Waring, as the one man who could keep me in order. Strange to say, I didn’t want to be kept in order; and I wasn’t frightened of myself. I’m only frightened of death and of waste: a wasted life, with all the love and the beauty left out of it. You gave me the feeling that you had something I needed to keep my life from being wasted.”
“And do you feel that no longer?”
“Have I needed you these last two years? I’ve ceased to look for happiness.”