I could not sleep.

After Virginia had lain down in the wagon, I walked about silently so as not to rouse her, prowling like a wolf.

I crept to the side of the wagon and listened for her breathing; and when I heard it my hands trembled, and my heart pounded in my breast.

All the things through which I had lived without partaking of them came back into my mind.

I thought of what I heard every day on the canal--that all women were alike; that they existed only for that sort of companionship with men with which my eyes were so ignorantly familiar; that all their protestations and refusals were for effect only; that a man need only to be a man, to know what he wanted, and conquer it.