ain-work. You must give it up."

For a fortnight she lay tired and passive, surrendered and inert, caring
for nothing but to give up and lie still and drink hot milk. Then she
struggled up and mooned about the house and garden, and cried weakly from
time to time, and felt depressed and bored, and as if life were over and
she were at the bottom of the sea.

"This must be what mother feels," she thought. "Poor mother.... I'm
like her; I've had my life, and I'm too stupid to work, and I can only
cry.... Men must work and women must weep.... I never knew before that
that was true.... I mustn't see mother just now, it would be the last
straw ... like the skeletons people used to look at to warn themselves
what they would come to.... Poor mother ... and poor me.... But mother's
getting better now she's being analysed. That wouldn't help me at all. I
analyse myself too much already.... And I was so happy a few months ago.
What a dreadful end to a good ambition. I shall never work again, I
suppose, in any way that counts. So that's that.... Why do I want to work
and to do something? Other wives and mothers don't.... Or do they, only
they don't know it, because they don't analyse? I believe they do, lots
of them. Or is it only my horrible egotism and vanity, that can't take a
back seat quietly? I was always like that, I know. Nan and I and Gilbert.
Not Jim so much, and not Pamela at all. But Rodney's worse than I am; he
wouldn't want to be counted out, put on the shelf, in the forties; he'd
be frightfully sick if he had to stand by and see other people working
and getting on and in the thick of things when he wasn't. He couldn't
bear it; he'd take to drink, I think.... I hope Rodney won't ever have
a nervous breakdown and feel like this, poor darling, he'd be dreadfully
tiresome.... Not to work after all. Not to be a doctor.... What then?
Just go about among people, grinning like a dog. Winter in town, talking,
dining, being the political wife. Summer in the country, walking, riding,
reading, playing tennis. Fun, of course. But what's it all for? When I've
got Gerda off my hands I shall have done being a mother, in any sense
that matters. Is being a wife enough to live for? Rodney's wife? Oh, I
want to be some use, want to do things, to count.... And Rodney will die
some time--I know he'll die first--and then I shan't even be a wife. And
in twenty years I shan't be able to do things with my body much more, and
what then? What wi