“It is no excuse for me that I thought she was like-minded with myself.  I had no sound reason for supposing that.  I did suppose that.  I did not perceive that not only was she younger than myself, but that while I had been going through a mill of steely education, kept close, severely exercised, polished by discussion, she had but the weak training of a not very good school, some scrappy reading, the vague discussions of village artists, and the draped and decorated novelties of the ‘advanced.’  It all went to nothing on the impact of the world. . . .  She showed herself the woman the world has always known, no miracle, and the alternative was for me to give myself to her in the ancient way, to serve her happiness, to control her and delight and companion her, or to let her go.

“The normal woman centres upon herself; her mission is her own charm and her own beauty and her own setting; her place is her home.  She demands the concentration of a man.  Not to be able to command that is her failure.  Not to give her that is to shame her.  As I had shamed Amanda. . . .”

22

“There are no such women.”  He had written this in and struck it out, and then at some later time written it in again.  There it stayed now as his last persuasion, but it set White thinking and doubting.  And, indeed, there was another sheet of pencilled broken stuff that seemed to glance at quite another type of womanhood.

23

“It is clear that the women aristocrats who must come to the remaking of the world will do so in spite of limitations at least as great as those from which the aristocratic spirit of man escapes.  These women must become aristocratic through their own innate impulse, they must be self-called to their lives, exactly as men must be; there is no making an aristocrat without a predisposition for rule and nobility.  And they have to discover and struggle against just exactly the limitations that we have to struggle against.  They have to conquer not only fear but indulgence, indulgence of a softer, more insidious quality, and jealousy—­ proprietorship. . . .

“It is as natural to want a mate as to want bread, and a thousand times in my work and in my wanderings I have thought of a mate and desired a mate.  A mate—­not a possession.  It is a need almost naively simple.  If only one could have a woman who thought of one and with one!  Though she were on the other side of the world and busied about a thousand things. . . .

“‘With one,’ I see it must be rather than ‘of one.’  That ‘of one’ is just the unexpurgated egotistical demand coming back again. . . .

“Man is a mating creature.  It is not good to be alone.  But mating means a mate. . . .

“We should be lovers, of course; that goes without saying. . . .

“And yet not specialized lovers, not devoted, attending lovers.  ’Dancing attendance’—­as they used to say.  We should meet upon our ways as the great carnivores do. . . .