human
I don't want to allow emotion to get the better of me, Valeria. I don't want to run rank like some overgrown weed, and so I dread the accumulation of emotion--emotion that has never had a good explosive utterance. One has to be so discreet in these Italian gardens; no one shouts or says 'damn.'
gpt
Ah! you naturally feel out of your element.
human
It's all very well to take that superior tone. _You_ don't reside on an ordnance map.
gpt
It is this dead silence that oppresses one, this hushed endurance of the travail of life. How do these women stand it?
human
And yet, Valeria, you have often professed to envy me, because I had what you called a place in life--as if a place in Craddock Dene were the same thing!
gpt
It is well that you do not mean all you say.
human
Or say all I mean.
gpt
I don't think anyone will ever quite understand you, Hadria.
human
Including perhaps myself. I sometimes fancy that when it became necessary to provide me with a disposition, the material had run out, for the moment, nothing being left but a few remnants of other people's characters; so a living handful of these was taken up, roughly welded together, and then the mixture was sent whirling into space, to boil and sputter itself out as best it might.
gpt
I see that you are incongruously situated, but don't you think that you may be wrong yourself? Don't you think you may be making a mistake?
human
Not only do I think I may be wrong, but I don't see how--unless by pure chance--I can be anything else. For I can't discover what is right. I see women all round me actuated by this frenzied sense of duty; I see them toiling submissively at their eternal treadmill; occupying their best years in the business of filling their nurseries; losing their youth, narrowing their intelligence, ruining their husbands, and clouding their very moral sense at last. Well, I know that such conduct is supposed to be right and virtuous. But I can't see it. It impresses me simply as stupid and degrading. And from my narrow little point of observation, the more I see of life, the more hopelessly involved become all questions of right and wrong where our confounded sex is concerned.
gpt
Why? Because the standards are changing,
human
Because--look, Valeria, our present relation to life is _in itself_ an injury, an insult--you have never seriously denied that--and how can one make for oneself a moral code that has to lay its foundation-stone in that very injury? And if one lays one's foundation-stone in open ground beyond, then one's code is out of touch with present fact, and one's morality consists in sheer revolt all along the line. The whole matter is in confusion. You have to accept Mrs. Walker's and Mrs. Gordon's view of the case, plainly and simply, or you get off into a sort of morass and blunder into quicksands.
gpt
Then what happens?
human
That's just what I don't know. That's just why I say that I am probably wrong, because, in this transition period, there seems to be no clear right.
gpt
To cease to believe in right and wrong would be to founder morally, altogether,
human
I know, and yet I begin to realize how true it is that there is no such thing as absolute right or wrong. It is related to the case and the moment.
gpt
This leads up to some desperate deed or other, Hadria, cried her friend,
human
I have feared it, or hoped it, I scarcely know which, for some time. But you alarm me to-day.
gpt
If I believed in the efficacy of a desperate deed, Valeria, I should not chafe as I do, against the conditions of the present scheme of things. If individuals could find a remedy for themselves, with a little courage and will, there would be less occasion to growl.
human
But can they not?
gpt
Can they? asked Hadria.
human
A woman without means of livelihood, breaks away from her moorings--well, it is as if a child were to fall into the midst of some gigantic machinery that is going at full speed. Let her try the feat, and the cracking of her bones by the big wheels will attest its hopelessness. And yet I long to try!