measure, but Handitch and its intimations were
clear and strong.

"We can't have that," I said.

"No," she said, "we can't have that."

"We've got our own things to do."

"YOUR things," she said.

"Aren't they yours too?"

"Because of you," she said.

"Aren't they your very own things?"

"Women don't have that sort of very own thing. Indeed, it's true!
And think! You've been down there preaching the goodness of children,
telling them the only good thing in a state is happy, hopeful children,
working to free mothers and children--"

"And we give our own children to do it?" I said.

"Yes," she said. "And sometimes I think it's too much to give--too much
altogether.... Children get into a woman's brain--when she mustn't have
them, especially when she must never hope for them. Think of the child
we might have now!--the little creature with soft, tender skin, and
little hands and little feet! At times it haunts me. It comes and says,
Why wasn't I given life? I can hear it in the night.... The world is
full of such little ghosts, dear lover--little things that asked for
life and were refused. They clamour to me. It's like a little fist
beating at my heart. Love children, beautiful children. Little cold
hands that tear at my heart! Oh, my heart and my lord!" She was holding
my arm with both her hands and weeping against it, and now she drew
herself to my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace. "I shall never
sit with your child on my knee and you beside me-never, and I am a woman
and your lover!..."

2

But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more and
more apparent to us. We found ourselves seeking justification, clinging
passionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly, impossible and
fated. We wanted quite intensely to live together and have a child, but
also we wanted very many other things that were incompatible with these
desires. It was extraordinarily difficult to weigh our political and
intellectual ambitions against those intimate wishes. The weights kept
altering according as one found oneself grasping this valued thing or
that. It wasn't as if we could throw everything aside for our love,
and have that as we wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn't
altogether, or even chiefly, a thing in itself--it is for the most part
a value set upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other
interests; to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to