ver since
I spent my very considerable superfluous energies in wrecking your
career. Because you know I wrecked it, Stephen. I _knew_ I was wrecking
it and I wrecked it. I knew exactly what I was doing all the time. I had
meant to be so fine a thing for you, a mothering friend, to have that
dear consecutive kindly mind of yours steadying mine, to have seen you
grow to power over men, me helping, me admiring. It was to have been so
fine. So fine! Didn't I urge you to marry Rachel, make you talk of her.
Don't you remember that? And one day when I saw you thinking of Rachel,
saw a kind of pride in your eyes!--suddenly I couldn't stand it. I went
to my room after you had gone and thought of you and her until I wanted
to scream. I couldn't bear it. It was intolerable. I was violent to my
toilet things. I broke a hand-glass. Your dignified, selfish,
self-controlled Mary _smashed_ a silver hand-mirror. I never told you
that. You know what followed. I pounced on you and took you. Wasn't I--a
soft and scented hawk? Was either of us better than some creature of
instinct that does what it does because it must? It was like a gust of
madness--and I cared, I found, no more for your career than I cared for
any other little thing, for honor, for Rachel, for Justin, that stood
between us....

"My dear, wasn't all that time, all that heat and hunger of desire, all
that secret futility of passion, the very essence of the situation
between men and women now? We are all trying most desperately to be
human beings, to walk erect, to work together--what was your
phrase?--'in a multitudinous unity,' to share what you call a common
collective thought that shall rule mankind, and this tremendous force
which seizes us and says to us: 'Make that other being yours, bodily
yours, mentally yours, wholly yours--at any price, no matter the price,'
bars all our unifications. It splits the whole world into couples
watching each other. Until all our laws, all our customs seem the
servants of that. It is the passion of the body swamping the brain; it's
an ape that has seized a gun, a beautiful modern gun. Here am I,
Justin's captive, and he mine, he mine because at the first escapade of
his I get my liberty. Here are we two, I and you, barred for ever from
the sight of one another, and I and you writing--I at any rate--in spite
of the ill-concealed resentment of my partner. We're just two, peeping
through our bars, of a universal multitude. Everywhere this