baffled impression of walking among mysteries and
novelties that she could not grasp. She began to be painfully conscious
of the effects of the narrow life that she had led, and of the
limitations that had crippled her in a thousand ways hitherto scarcely
realized.

"One begins to learn everything too late," she wrote to Algitha. "This
ought all to have been familiar long ago. I don't know anything about
the world in which I live. I have never before caught so much as a
distant glimpse of it. And even now there are strange thick wrappings
from the past that cling tight round and hold me aloof, strive as I may
to strip off that past-made personality, and to understand, by touch,
what things are made of. I feel as if I would risk anything in order to
really know that. Why should a woman treat herself as if she were
Dresden china? She is more or less insulted and degraded whatever
happens, especially if she obeys what our generation is pleased to call
the moral law. The more I see of life, the more hideous seems the
position that women hold in relation to the social structure, and the
more sickening the current nonsense that is talked about us and our
'missions' and 'spheres.' It is so feeble, so futile, to try to ornament
an essentially degrading fact. It is such insolence to talk to us--good
heavens, to _us!_--about holiness and sacredness, when men (to whom
surely a sense of humour has been denied) divide their women into two
great classes, both of whom they insult and enslave, insisting
peremptorily on the existence of each division, but treating one class
as private and the other as public property. One might as well talk to
driven cattle in the shambles about their 'sacred mission' as to women.
It is an added mockery, a gratuitous piece of insolence."

Having been, from childhood, more or less at issue with her
surroundings, Hadria had never fully realized their power upon her
personality. But now daily a fresh recognition of her continued
imprisonment, baffled her attempt to look at things with clear eyes. She
struggled to get round and beyond that past-fashioned self, not merely
in order to see truly, but in order to see at all. And in doing so, she
ran the risk of letting go what she might have done better to hold. She
felt painfully different from these people among whom she found herself.
Her very trick of pondering over things sent her spinning to hopeless
distances. They seemed to ponder so wholesomely little