What a shame it was that he could not go quietly to her with all this,
tell her everything. A lie was rooted, concealed, beyond removal at the
base of the honesty he planned. There was, of course, this additional
phase of the difficulty--what had happened concerned Savina even more
than it did his wife and him. He had Savina Grove, so entirely in his
hands, to guard. And the innate animosity of women toward women was
incalculable. That wasn't a new thought, but it recurred to him with
special force. As much as he desired it, utter frankness, absolute
safety, was impossible. Fanny's standard of duty, or responsibility,
was worlds apart from his.
Bitterly and without premeditation he cursed the tyranny of sex; in
countless forms it dominated, dictated, every aspect of life. Men's
conception of women was quite exclusively founded on it in its aspects
of chastity or license. In the latter they deprecated the former, and
in the first they condemned all trace of the latter. The result of this
was that women, the prostitutes and the mothers alike, as well, had no
other validity of judgment. The present marriage was hardly more than
an exchange of the violation of innocence, or of acted innocence, for
an adequate material consideration. If this were not true, why was
innocence--a silly fact in itself--so insisted upon? Lee was forced to
conclude however, that it was the fault of men: they turned, at an
advancing age when it was possible to gather a comfortable competence,
to the young.
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