She spoke it out boldly now, and was amazed that not one of the clamorous voices dared resist the authenticity of her statement.  But after all, how would they dare?  This was what she had found in her own heart, what they had not been able, for all their clamor, to prevent her from seeing.  She had been strong enough to beat them, to stand out against them, to say that she saw what she really did see, and felt what she really did feel.  She did not feel what traditionally she should feel, that is what a primitive Italian woman might feel, all of whose emotional life had found no other outlet than sex. . . .

Well, if it was so, it was so.  For better or for worse, that was the kind of woman she had become, with the simple, forthright physical life subordinate, humble; like a pleasant, lovable child playing among the strong, full-grown, thought-freighted interests and richly varied sympathies and half-impersonal joys and sorrows which had taken possession of her days.  And she could not think that the child could ever again be master of her destiny, any more than (save in a moment of false sentimentality) she could think that she would like to have her horizon again limited by a doll-house.  To be herself was to go on, not to go back, now that she knew what she had become.  It seemed to her that never before had she stood straight up.

And in plain fact she found that somehow she had risen to her feet and was now standing, her head up, almost touching the rafters of the slant ceiling.  She could have laughed out, to find herself so free.  She knew now why she had never known the joy of battle.  It was because she had been afraid.  And she had been afraid because she had never dared to enter the battle, had always sent others in to do her fighting for her.  Now she had been forced into it and had won.  And there was nothing to be afraid of, there!

She spread out her arms in a great gesture of liberation.  How had she ever lived before, under the shadow of that coward fear?  This . . . this . . . she had a moment of vision . . . this was what Neale had been trying to do for her, all these years, unconsciously, not able to tell her what it was, driving at the mark only with the inarticulate wisdom of his love for her, his divination of her need.  He had seen her, shivering and shrinking in the shallow waters, and had longed for her sake to have her strike out boldly into the deep.  But even if he had been ever so able to tell her, she would not have understood till she had fought her way through those ravening breakers, beyond them, out into the sustaining ocean.

How long it took, how long for men and women to make the smallest advance!  And how the free were the only ones who could help to liberate the bound.  How she had fought against Neale’s effort to set her free, had cried to him that she dared not risk herself on the depths, that he must have the strength to swim for her . . . and how Neale, doggedly sure of the simple truth, too simple for her to see, had held to the certainty that his effort would not make her strong, and that she would only be free if she were strong.