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"No woman ever has believed them."

"You have to choose a man," said Verrall, apprehending her before I did.

"We're brought up to that. We're told--it's in books, in stories, in the way people look, in the way they behave--one day there will come a man. He will be everything, no one else will be anything. Leave everything else; live in him."

"And a man, too, is taught that of some woman," said Verrall.

"Only men don't believe it! They have more obstinate minds. . . . Men have never behaved as though they believed it. One need not be old to know that. By nature they don't believe it. But a woman believes nothing by nature. She goes into a mould hiding her secret thoughts almost from herself."

"She used to," I said.

"You haven't," said Verrall, "anyhow."

"I've come out. It's this comet. And Willie. And because I never really believe in the mould at all--even if I thought I did. It's stupid to send Willie off--shamed, cast out, never to see him again--when I like him as much as I do. It is cruel, it is wicked and ugly, to prance over him as if he was a defeated enemy, and pretend I'm going to be happy just the same. There's no sense in a rule of life that prescribes that: It's selfish. It's brutish.