“It’s all right! I can stand it!” she cried. “I had plenty of practice with your father, and now I’m going to have the same thing with you.⁠ ⁠… Oh, it’s a cruel thing to be a woman!”

She pushed back her grey hair from her forehead with one hand, while the other twitched frantically at her waistband. Never had her handsome features looked more noble; never had her whole personality projected such magnificent, such primeval passion.

Wolf, as he watched her, felt weak, despicable, faltering. He felt like a finical attendant watching the splendid fury of some Sophoclean heroine. He became aware that her anger leaped up from some incalculable crevasse in the rock-crust of the universe, such as he himself had never approached. The nature of her feeling, its directness, its primordial simplicity, reduced his own emotion to something ridiculous. She towered above him there with that grand convulsed face and those expanded breasts; while her fine hands, clutching at her belt, seemed to display a wild desire to strip herself naked before him, to overwhelm him with the wrath of her naked maternal body, bare to the outrage of his impiety.