She sat excitedly in front of him, having read her final pages, face flushed, voice resonating, her whole being feverish. It was as if she wanted to fling those pages full of bitterness at the feet of her Dutch sisters, at the feet of all women. Lost in his reflections, melancholy in his pity for her, he had scarcely listened, and shook his head in vague approval. And suddenly she spoke about herself, gave herself completely, told the story of her life: her young lady’s existence in The Hague, the upbringing designed to make her shine a little and be pleasant and beautiful, without one serious look at her future, simply awaiting a good match, with a flirtation here, and a crush there until she was married; a good marriage in her own circle; her husband a lieutenant in the hussars, a handsome strapping fellow, good distinguished family, a little money, with whom she had fallen in love because of his handsome face, and the dashing figure he cut in uniform, which suited him; who had fallen in love with her, as he might have fallen in love with another girl, because she had a pretty face: then, the revelation of those very first days: the immediate eruption of disharmony between their characters. She, spoiled at home, fine, delicate, sensitive, but egoistically sensitive, but irritable about her own spoiled ego; he, no longer paying court, but immediately and crudely the husband with rights to this and rights to that, now with curses, now with fulminations; she, without any tact, without any of the patience needed to make the best of their lives that were headed for disaster: nervous, passionate, pitching passion against coarseness, which made his violence flare up to the point where he abused her, swore at her, hit her, shook her and slammed her against the wall …
Then her divorce; he at first unwilling, despite everything happy to have a home, and in that home a wife, a little woman for the master of the house, and not wanting to return to the wretchedness of living in rooms, until she simply left, went to her parents, to friends out of town, inveighing against the law, so unjust to women … He had finally given in, allowed himself to be charged with adultery, which was not far from the truth. Then she was free, but she stood as if alone, looked at askance by everyone she knew, unwilling to bow to their conventional insistence on that kind of semi-mourning that according to their conventional notions should surround a divorced woman, and returning immediately to her earlier young girl’s glittering existence. But she had felt that it could not go on like that, neither for her friends nor for herself: the friends looking askance at her, and she disgusted by them, their receptions and their dinners, until she had become deeply unhappy, lonely, lost, without anything, without anybody, and had experienced the pressure that weighs on the divorced woman. Deep down she had occasionally thought that with great patience and tact she might have been able to control her husband, that he was not bad, just coarse, that she still loved him, or at least his handsome face and strong body. It wasn’t love, but had she ever thought about love, in the way she now had occasional premonitions of it? And didn’t everyone compromise more or less in their lives, adapting to what they had been given? But she scarcely admitted that regret to herself, did not even admit it to Duco, though she did admit her bitterness, her hatred for her husband, for marriage, convention, people, the world: for all the great abstractions, generalising her own feeling into a single curse against life. He listened to her, with pity. He felt that there was something noble in her, but that it had been stifled from the outset. He forgave her for not being artistic, but it pained him that she had never found herself, that she did not know who she was, what her life should be like, where the line of her life was winding to, the only path that she must follow, as every life follows one path. Oh, how often, if people simply let themselves go, like a flower, like a bird, like a cloud, like a star, which orbited obediently, they would find their happiness and their life, as the flower and the bird found them, as the cloud drifted in the sun and the star followed its orbit. But he told her nothing of what he was thinking, knowing that particularly in her mood of bitterness she would not understand and would derive no support from it, that it would be too vague for her, and too alien to her own thoughts. She was thinking of herself, but she thought that she was thinking of Women, Girls and their movement towards the Future. The lines of women … But did not each woman have her own line? But how few knew it, their direction, their path, their lifeline, its meandering course through the twilight of the future. And perhaps, because they did not know for themselves, they were now looking for a wide path for all of them, a main highway, along which hosts of them could advance, a surging throng of women, regiments of women, with slogans and banners and war cries, a broad path, parallel to the men’s movement, until the paths merged into one, till the hosts of women mixed with the hosts of men, with equal rights and freedom to live as they chose …