Directly I had parted from Rachel's questioning eyes I wanted to go back to them. It seems to me now that all the way across to America, in that magnificent German liner I joined at Hamburg, I was thinking in confused alternations of her and of Mary. There are turns of thought that still bring back inseparably with them the faint echo of the airs of the excellent but band that our crossing.  
I had been shocked and concerned at the thought of Mary bearing children. It is a thing to confess but I had never let myself imagine the possibility of such a thing for her who had been so immensely mine....
 
We are the oddest creatures, little son, beasts and and brains, neither one nor the other but all confusedly, and here was I who had given up Mary and resigned her and freed myself from her as I thought altogether, cast back again into my old pit by the most obvious and necessary consequence of her surrender and mine. And it's just there and in that relation that we men and women are so elaborately insecure. We try to love as equals and behave as equals and concede a level freedom, and then comes a crisis,—our of liberty and we perceive that so far as sex goes the woman to the man no more than a possession—c............