sn't law, nor custom, nor masculine violence settled that. It is just
how things happen to be. She wants to be free--she wants to be legally
and economically free, so as not to be subject to the wrong man; but
only God, who made the world, can alter things to prevent her being
slave to the right one.

"And if she can't have the right one?

"We've developed such a quality of preference!"

She rubbed her knuckles into her forehead. "Oh, but life is difficult!"
she groaned. "When you loosen the tangle in one place you tie a knot in
another.... Before there is any change, any real change, I shall be
dead--dead--dead and finished--two hundred years!..."

Part 5

One afternoon, while everything was still, the wardress heard her cry
out suddenly and alarmingly, and with great and unmistakable passion,
"Why in the name of goodness did I burn that twenty pounds?"

Part 6

She sat regarding her dinner. The meat was coarse and disagreeably
served.

"I suppose some one makes a bit on the food," she said....

"One has such ridiculous ideas of the wicked common people and the
beautiful machinery of order that ropes them in. And here are these
places, full of contagion!

"Of course, this is the real texture of life, this is what we refined
secure people forget. We think the whole thing is straight and noble at
bottom, and it isn't. We think if we just defy the friends we have and
go out into the world everything will become easy and splendid.
One doesn't realize that even the sort of civilization one has at
Morningside Park is held together with difficulty. By policemen one
mustn't shock.

"This isn't a world for an innocent girl to walk about in. It's a world
of dirt and skin diseases and parasites. It's a world in which the
law can be a stupid pig and the police-stations dirty dens. One wants
helpers and protectors--and clean water.

"Am I becoming reasonable or am I being tamed?

"I'm simply discovering that life is many-sided and complex and
puzzling. I thought one had only to take it by the throat.

"It hasn't GOT a throat!"

Part 7

One day the idea of self-sacrifice came into her head, and she made, she
thought, some important moral discoveries.

It came with an extreme effect of re-discovery, a remarkable novelty.
"What have I been all this time?" she asked herself, and answered, "Just
stark egotism, crude assertion of Ann Veronica, without a modest rag of
religion or discipline or resp