“Yes,” said Nettie, slowly following me, “but you control it.”
“Only through a measure of obedience. There is no magic in the business—to conquer matter, we must divide the enemy, and take matter as an ally. Nowadays it is indeed true, by faith a man can remove mountains; he can say to a mountain, Be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea; but he does it because he helps and trusts his brother men, because he has the wit and patience and courage to win over to his side iron, steel, obedience, dynamite, cranes, trucks, the money of other people. . . . To conquer my desire for you, I must not perpetually thwart it by your presence; I must go away so that I may not see you, I must take up other interests, thrust myself into struggles and discussions———”
“Not forget,” I said; “but anyhow—cease to brood upon you.”
“No,” she said, demolished her last pattern and looked up at Verrall as he stirred.
Verrall leant forward on the table, elbows upon it, and the fingers of his two hands intertwined.
“You know,” he said, “I haven’t thought much of these things. At school and the university, one doesn’t. . . . It was part of the system to prevent it. They’ll alter all that, no doubt. We seem”—he thought—“to be skating about over questions that one came to at last in Greek—with variorum readings—in Plato, but which it never occurred to any one to translate out of a dead language into living realities. . . .” He halted and answered some unspoken question from his own mind with, “No. I think with Leadford, Nettie, that, as he put it, it is in the nature of things for men to be exclusive. . . . Minds are free things and go about the world, but only one man can possess a woman. You must dismiss rivals. We are made for the struggle for existence—we _are_ the struggle for existence; the things that live are the struggle for existence incarnate—and that works out that the men struggle for their mates; for each woman one prevails. The others go away.”
“There are many things in life,” I said, “but that is the rough universal truth.”
“But,” said Nettie, “you don’t struggle. That has been altered because men have minds.”
She gave a little impatient “Oh! Why are women always the slaves of sex? Is this great age of Reason and Light that has come to alter nothing of that? And men too! I think it is all—stupid. I do not believe this is the right solution of the thing, or anything but the bad habits of the time that was. . . Instinct! You don’t let your instincts rule you in a lot of other things. Here am I between you. Here is Edward. I—love him because he is gay and pleasant, and because—because I _like_ him! Here is Willie—a part of me—my first secret, my oldest friend! Why must I not have both? Am I not a mind that you must think of me as nothing but a woman? imagine me always as a thing to struggle for?” She paused; then she made her distressful proposition to me. “Let us three keep together,” she said. “Let us not part. To part is hate, Willie. Why should we not anyhow keep friends? Meet and talk?”