o never have a whole hour
alone. They live in reluctant or indifferent companionship, as people
may in a boarding-house, by paradoxical choice, familiar with one another
and not intimate. They live under careless observation and subject to a
vagabond curiosity. Theirs is the involuntary and perhaps the
unconscious loss which is futile and barren.

One knows the men, and the many women, who have sacrificed all their
solitude to the perpetual society of the school, the cloister, or the
hospital ward. They walk without secrecy, candid, simple, visible,
without moods, unchangeable, in a constant communication and practice of
action and speech. Theirs assuredly is no barren or futile loss, and
they have a conviction, and they bestow the conviction, of solitude
deferred.

Who has painted solitude so that the solitary seemed to stand alone and
inaccessible? There is the loneliness of the shepherdess in many a
drawing of J.F. Millet. The little figure is away, aloof. The girl
stands so when the painter is gone. She waits so on the sun for the
closing of the hours of pasture. Millet has her as she looks, out of
sight.

Now, although solitude is a prepared, secured, defended, elaborate
possession of the rich, they too deny themselves the natural solitude of
a woman with a child. A newly-born child is so nursed and talked about,
handled and jolted and carried about by aliens, and there is so much
importunate service going forward, that a woman is hardly alone long
enough to become aware, in recollection, how her own blood moves
separately, beside her, with another rhythm and different pulses. All is
commonplace until the doors are closed upon the two. This unique
intimacy is a profound retreat, an absolute seclusion. It is more than
single solitude; it is a redoubled isolation more remote than mountains,
safer than valleys, deeper than forests, and further than mid-sea.

That solitude partaken--the only partaken solitude in the world--is the
Point of Honour of ethics. Treachery to that obligation and a betrayal
of that confidence might well be held to be the least pardonable of all
crimes. There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a
woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a
child's foot runs. But the favourite crime of the sentimentalist is that
of a woman against her child. Her power, her intimacy, her opportunity,
that should be her accusers, are held to excu