ick changes of her eyes. It gives just that pessimistic
touch that tempered her valiant adventurousness, that gave a color at
last to the tragedy of her death....

"Have you ever thought, Stephen, that perhaps these (repressionist)
people are righter than you are--that if the worker gets free he _won't_
work and that if the woman gets free she won't furl her sex and stop
disturbing things? Suppose she _is_ wicked as a sex, suppose she _will_
trade on her power of exciting imaginative men. A lot of these new
women run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, beguile some poor
innocent of a man to ruin them and then call in fathers, brother,
husbands, friends, chivalry, all the rest of it, and make the best of
both sides of a sex. Suppose we go on behaving like that. After we've
got all our emancipations. Suppose that the liberation of common people
simply means loafing, no discipline, nothing being done, an end to labor
and the beginning of nothing to replace it, and that the liberation of
women simply means the elaboration of mischief. Suppose that it is so.
Suppose you are just tumbling the contents of the grate into the middle
of the room. Then all this emancipation _is_ a decay, even as
conservative-minded people say,--it's none the less a decay because we
want it,--and the only thing to stop it is to stop it, and to have more
discipline and more suppression and say to women and the common people:
'Back to the Sterner Virtues; Back to Servitude!' I wish I hadn't these
reactionary streaks in my thoughts, but I have and there you are...."

And then towards the second year her letters began to break away from
her preoccupation with her position as a woman and to take up new
aspects of life, more general aspects of life altogether. It had an
effect not of her having exhausted the subject but as if, despairing of
a direct solution, she turned deliberately to the relief of other
considerations. She ceased to question her own life, and taking that for
granted, wrote more largely of less tangible things. She remembered that
she had said that life, if it was no more than its present appearances,
was "utter nonsense." She went back to that. "One says things like
that," she wrote "and not for a moment does one believe it. I grumble
at my life, I seem to be always weakly and fruitlessly fighting my life,
and I love it. I would not be willingly dead--for anything. I'd rather
be an old match-woman selling matches on a freezing nigh