and all the pains _I've_ taken---- Oh! I _hate_ Worms.
Dust and ashes! Well here thank heaven! comes the train. If nothing else
could stir you, Stephen, at least I could have imagined some decent
impulse of gratitude to me. Stephen, you're disgusting. You've
absolutely spoilt this trip for me--absolutely. When only a little
reasonableness on your part---- Oh!"

She left her sentence unfinished.

Berwick and I had to make any conversation that was needed on the way
back to Boppard. Rachel did not talk and the Fuerstin did not want to.

Sec. 6

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 eve