That eternal dialogue in which you are always alone is crushing.

Throw yourself into some occupation?
Work?
No use.

Doesn't work always have to be done over again?
Have children and bring them up?
That makes you feel both that you are done and finished and that you are beginning over again to no purpose.

However, who knows ?" It was the first time that she softened.
"I have not been given the chance to practise the devotion, the submission, the humiliation of a mother.

Perhaps that would have guided me in life.