Harry questioned: “Every opinion and every custom would tell a man to go? No, no. You’re taking too much for granted, Rosalie. He wouldn’t go, necessarily, and he wouldn’t be advised to go, if he had duties that pulled him the other way.”
She gave a note of amusement. “But that’s the point. He never would have such duties. It’s notable that a man always makes his duties and his ambitions go hand in hand. Yes, it’s notable, that.”
“Well, put it another way. Suppose it wasn’t necessary for him to go.... Suppose nothing depended on his going, much on his staying. That makes the parallel, Rosalie.”
She said to him, “Ah, I’ll agree to that. Let that make the parallel. They’d tell a man in such a case, ‘Man, take up your ambitions. You are a man. You have yourself to think of.’ That’s what they’d say. Well, that’s what I’m saying. ‘I am a woman. I have myself to think of.’”
The more she thought, the more she stiffened. This was the thought against whose goad she always came--Why should she be hesitant? What a position! What a light upon the case and upon the status of woman that, just because she was a woman, she must not consider her own, her personal interests! For no other reason; just that; because she was a woman!
“I’ve shut a gate behind me,” she on another day said to Harry. “That’s what I’ve done. I’ve come out of a place and shut the gate behind me and because I am a woman I mustn’t open it and go back. That’s what a woman’s life is--always shutting gates behind her. There aren’t gates for a man. There’re just turnstiles. As he came out so he can always go back--even to his youth. When he’s fifty he still can go back and have the society of twenty and play the fool as he did at twenty. Can a woman?”
“That’s physical,” said Harry. “A man much longer keeps his youth.”
She said then the first aggressively bitter thing he ever had heard her say. “Ah, keeps his youth!” she said. “So does a dog that’s run free. It’s the chain and kennel sort that age.”
She looked back upon the days when she had discovered for herself the difference between sentiment and sense, between sentimentality and sensibility. She then had made her life, and therefore then her happiness, by putting away sentiment and using sense for spectacles. She told herself she now was ruining her life, and certainly letting go her happiness, by suffering herself to bear the sentimental handicap.