ut
their real relationship. To him it had seemed as if they were two
children wandering in the unfriendly desert that is life, comforting
each other with kisses, finding in their love a refuge from coldness and
unkindness. But in her fear he perceived that she had never been his
comrade. She had thought of him as an external power, like the Church,
who told her to do things, and in the end the choice had been for her
not between a dear and pitied lover and a creed, but between two
tyrants; and since one tyrant threatened damnation while the other only
promised love, a sensible woman knew which to choose. All he had thought
of her had been an illusion. The years he had given to his love for her
were as wasted as if he had spent them in drunkenness or in prison.

Oh, women were the devil! All except his mother. They were the clumsiest
of biological devices, and as they handed on life they spoiled it. They
stood at the edge of the primeval swamps and called the men down from
the highlands of civilisation and certain cells determined upon
immortality betrayed their victims to them. They served the seed of
life, but to all the divine accretions that had gathered round it, the
courage that adventures, the intellect that creates, the soul that
questions how it came, they were hostile. They hated the complicated
brains that men wear in their heads as men hated the complicated hats
that women wear on their heads; they hated men to look at the stars
because they are sexless; they hated men who loved them passionately
because such love was tainted with the romantic and imaginative quality
that spurs them to the folly of science and art and exploration. And yet
surely there were other women. Surely there was a woman somewhere who,
if one loved her, would prove not a mere possession who would either
bore one or go and get lost just when one had grown accustomed to it,
but would be an endless research. A woman who would not be a mere film
of graceful submissiveness but real as a chemical substance, so that one
could observe her reactions and find out her properties; and like a
chemical substance, irreducible to final terms, so that one never came
to an end. A woman who would get excited about life as men do and could
laugh and cheer. A woman whose beauty would be forever significant with
speculation. He perceived with a shock that he was thinking of this
woman not as one thinks of a hypothetical person, but with the glowing
satisfact