p. 315 "I stopped rubbing my longjohns, then considered getting a postcard from my collection in my dresser drawer. The woman in the woods. It could not be that way for me. Somehow I knew it. Some "over me" was always watching, and not for an instant could I forget it. Perhaps it could not be that way for any man, I wasn't sure, and I had no intention of asking anyone. Nothing I had ever read in books enlightened me. On the one hand I envied her, that woman on the moss, wished I could be capable of such abandonment. But it was, I told myself, a carrot dangled by biology, the animal impulse to chase after which I must not give into or it would mean my doom. I well understood my father's horror of domesticity, of entrapment and confinement. The thought of nights in some fetid breeding bed while the products of other such nights lay listening in the next room or outside the door I found so revolting that I vowed I would never marry. My parents marriage was the only marriage I knew from the inside out. To me, their marriage was marriage. To live thus would be to forsake all destinies but the anxiety-ridden drudgery of caring for a horde of children. I would never drag myself out of poverty if I got married, let alone achieve more than the limited success considered proper for the best of my kind by men like Reeves.
Trapped in a marriage, I would be driven mad by the casual assumption of privilege and preferment and innate superiority of "the quality," it its effect on my father was anything to judge by. But unlike my father, I told myself, I was outraged by the "quality" not only on my own behalf, but also on behalf of others. I saw no contradiction in wanting to achieve greatness through altruism. How else but through altruism could on by both virtuous and great?
But before I could make up my mind about the postcard, I fell back to sleep."
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