be a
generation of martyrs.... Why shouldn't we be martyrs? There's
nothing else for most of us, anyhow. It's a sort of blacklegging to want
to have a life of one's own...."

She repeated, as if she answered an objector: "A sort of blacklegging.

"A sex of blacklegging clients."

Her mind diverged to other aspects, and another type of womanhood.

"Poor little Miniver! What can she be but what she is?... Because
she states her case in a tangle, drags it through swamps of nonsense, it
doesn't alter the fact that she is right."

That phrase about dragging the truth through swamps of nonsense she
remembered from Capes. At the recollection that it was his, she seemed
to fall through a thin surface, as one might fall through the crust of
a lava into glowing depths. She wallowed for a time in the thought of
Capes, unable to escape from his image and the idea of his presence in
her life.

She let her mind run into dreams of that cloud paradise of an altered
world in which the Goopes and Minivers, the Fabians and reforming people
believed. Across that world was written in letters of light, "Endowment
of Motherhood." Suppose in some complex yet conceivable way women were
endowed, were no longer economically and socially dependent on men. "If
one was free," she said, "one could go to him.... This vile hovering
to catch a man's eye!... One could go to him and tell him one loved
him. I want to love him. A little love from him would be enough. It
would hurt no one. It would not burden him with any obligation."

She groaned aloud and bowed her forehead to her knees. She floundered
deep. She wanted to kiss his feet. His feet would have the firm texture
of his hands.

Then suddenly her spirit rose in revolt. "I will not have this slavery,"
she said. "I will not have this slavery."

She shook her fist ceilingward. "Do you hear!" she said "whatever you
are, wherever you are! I will not be slave to the thought of any man,
slave to the customs of any time. Confound this slavery of sex! I am a
man! I will get this under if I am killed in doing it!"

She scowled into the cold blacknesses about her.

"Manning," she said, and contemplated a figure of inaggressive
persistence. "No!" Her thoughts had turned in a new direction.

"It doesn't matter," she said, after a long interval, "if they are
absurd. They mean something. They mean everything that women can
mean--except submission. The vote is only the beginning, the necessary
beg