"But as definitely as my friend did not see my little sacrifices he
saw my little faults, and he made me see that he saw them. Men are so
free from the tender deceits that women are compact of.
"And as I needed blindness in some directions, in others I needed
clear sight.
"I needed some one to see that my woman's heart was not only the heart
of a happy mother, to whom God had given an almost perfect child, but
also the heart of a lover--not of a /grande amoureuse/, perhaps, but
of a lover who had been deprived of the love that is the complement of
woman's, and who suffered perpetually in woman's peculiar and terrible
way because of that deprivation.
"I needed an understanding of my sacred hunger, a comprehension of my
desolation, a realization that my efforts to fill my time with work
were as the efforts of a traveller in a forest to escape from the
wolves whose voices he hears behind him. I needed the recognition of a
simple truth--that the thing one is passionately eager to give is
nearly always the thing one is passionately eager to receive, and that
when I poured forth sympathy upon others I was longing to have it
poured forth upon me.
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