She had discovered something else as well: that under the best of circumstances marriage was an opposition of wills. One or the other of the married couple was always being gently, subtly, lovingly pushed out of shape; dominated; made to do the bidding of the other. Usually -- but this was not her theme -- it was the woman because it was the woman who came to married life the least experienced, untried and unknowing.

Women, more often than men, awakened from the long dream of adolescence to find themselves bound in perpetuity into their lives without any realization of how they had gotten there. Men suffered, too, from the condition -- she could see that -- but when all was said and done, after the awakening men knew better how to make use of the baptism by fire. Women were left staring into the fire.