directly i had parted from rachel's questioning eyes i wanted to go back to them. it seems to me now that all the way across to america, in that magnificent german liner i joined at hamburg, i was thinking in confused alternations of her and of mary. there are turns of thought that still bring back inseparably with them the faint echo of the airs of the excellent but industrious band that glorified our crossing.
i had been extraordinarily shocked and concerned at the thought of mary bearing children. it is a grotesque thing to confess but i had never let myself imagine the possibility of such a thing for her who had been so immensely mine....
we are the oddest creatures, little son, beasts and barbarians and brains, neither one nor the other but all confusedly, and here was i who had given up mary and resigned her and freed myself from her as i thought altogether, cast back again into my old pit by the most obvious and necessary consequence of her surrender and mine. and it's just there and in that relation that we men and women are so elaborately insecure. we try to love as equals and behave as equals and concede a level freedom, and then comes a crisis,—our laboriously contrived edifice of liberty collapses and we perceive that so far as sex goes the woman remains to the man no more than a possession—capable of loyalty or treachery.
there, still at that barbaric stage, the situation stands. you see i had always wanted to own mary, and always she had disputed that. that is our whole story, the story of an instinctive subjugation struggling against a passionate desire for fellowship. she had denied herself to me, taken herself away; that much i could endure; but now came this blazing fact that showed her as it seemed in the most material and conclusive way—overcome. i had storms of retrospective passion at the thoroughness of her surrender.... yes, and that's in everyone of us,—in everyone. i wonder if in all decent law-abiding london there lives a single healthy adult man who has not at times longed to trample and kill....
for once i think the fürstin miscalculated consequences. i think i should have engaged myself to rachel before i went to america if it had not been for the fürstin's revelation, but this so tore me that i could no longer go on falling in love again, naturally and sweetly. no man falls in love if he has just been flayed.... i could no longer think of rachel except as a foil to mary. i was moved to marry her by a new set of motives; to fling her so to speak in mary's face, and from the fierce vulgarity of that at least i recoiled—and let her go as i have told you.
