Virginia Woolf: The Voyage Out

22. Chapter XXII (continued)

"Listen to this, Rachel. 'It is probable that Hugh' (he's the hero, a literary man), 'had not realised at the time of his marriage, any more than the young man of parts and imagination usually does realise, the nature of the gulf which separates the needs and desires of the male from the needs and desires of the female. . . . At first they had been very happy. The walking tour in Switzerland had been a time of jolly companionship and stimulating revelations for both of them. Betty had proved herself the ideal comrade. . . . They had shouted Love in the Valley to each other across the snowy slopes of the Riffelhorn' (and so on, and so on--I'll skip the descriptions). . . . 'But in London, after the boy's birth, all was changed. Betty was an admirable mother; but it did not take her long to find out that motherhood, as that function is understood by the mother of the upper middle classes, did not absorb the whole of her energies. She was young and strong, with healthy limbs and a body and brain that called urgently for exercise. . . .' (In short she began to give tea-parties.) . . . 'Coming in late from this singular talk with old Bob Murphy in his smoky, book-lined room, where the two men had each unloosened his soul to the other, with the sound of the traffic humming in his ears, and the foggy London sky slung tragically across his mind . . . he found women's hats dotted about among his papers. Women's wraps and absurd little feminine shoes and umbrellas were in the hall. . . . Then the bills began to come in. . . . He tried to speak frankly to her. He found her lying on the great polar-bear skin in their bedroom, half-undressed, for they were dining with the Greens in Wilton Crescent, the ruddy firelight making the diamonds wink and twinkle on her bare arms and in the delicious curve of her breast-- a vision of adorable femininity. He forgave her all.' (Well, this goes from bad to worse, and finally about fifty pages later, Hugh takes a week-end ticket to Swanage and 'has it out with himself on the downs above Corfe.' . . . Here there's fifteen pages or so which we'll skip. The conclusion is . . .) 'They were different. Perhaps, in the far future, when generations of men had struggled and failed as he must now struggle and fail, woman would be, indeed, what she now made a pretence of being--the friend and companion-- not the enemy and parasite of man.'