"We went on a wedding-trip. I suppose sometimes a wedding-trip isn't a mockery. I'm not so bitter as not to know that often it isn't so--that often it is all right. I'm not denying love, and clean men and considerate. I'm not denying hosts of marriages that without any very high ideal are fit and decent enough. I'm not denying noble lovers--men and women--and noble marriages. I'm only saying that the other kind, the kind that's not fit nor clean nor decent and anything but noble, is so frequent and commonplace that it is rather laughable and altogether sardonic and devilish to kneel down and worship as we do the Institution of Staying Together--Staying Together at any price, even when evidently the only clean thing to do would be to Stay Apart.... My wedding-trip lasted four months. I went eighteen, and I came back old as I am now--older than I am now; for I have grown younger these last two years. My marriage wasn't the noble kind. It was the kind you couldn't make noble. It wasn't even the decent, low-order type. It was a sink and a pit and a horror."
She bent and stirred the fire. Outside the gusty wind went by and the rain beat upon the windows. "I know that there are marriages where woman is the ruiner. There are women who are wreckers. They fasten themselves on a man's life and drain it dry. They are devil-fish. They hold him in their arms and break his bones. They're among the worst of us struggling here in the pit. They're wicked women. They may be fewer than wicked men, or they may be equal in number, I don't know. I'm not talking of wicked men or wicked women in that sense. I'm talking of men whom the world does not call wicked, and of a great army of women like myself, an army that stretches round the world and through hundreds of years.... An army? It isn't an army. We never had any weapons. We were never taught to fight. We were never allowed to ask questions. We were told there were no questions to ask. We were young girls, dreaming, dropped into the wolf pack ... and it goes on all the time. It is going on now. It may be going on when Betty grows up--though I'll tell her! You needn't be afraid. I'll tell her....
"That wedding trip--that honeymoon. I had married a handsome beast--a cruel one, too. He treated me like a slave, bought for one purpose, wanted for one purpose, kept for one purpose. I wasn't enough for him--I found that out very soon. But those others were freer than I. They made him pay them.... He would have said that he paid me, too; that he supported me. Perhaps it's true. I only know that I am going to have Betty taught to support herself."