Chapter 11 — Edna refuses to come inside

Léonce comes back and finds Edna still in the hammock. "Are you asleep?" "No." Her eyes gleam bright and intense, with no sleepy shadows. "Do you know it is past one o'clock? Come on." He goes inside; he calls her. "Don't wait for me." He thrusts his head through the door, irritably: "You will take cold out there. What folly is this? Why don't you come in?" "It isn't cold; I have my shawl." "The mosquitoes will devour you." "There are no mosquitoes."

She hears him moving in irritation. "Another time she would have gone in at his request. She would, through habit, have yielded to his desire; not with any sense of submission or obedience to his compelling wishes, but unthinkingly, as we walk, move, sit, stand, go through the daily round of the life which has been portioned out to us." Léonce tries again: "Edna, dear, are you not coming in soon?" "No; I am going to stay out here." "This is more than folly. I can't permit you to stay out there all night. You must come in the house at once."

Edna writhes deeper into the hammock. "She felt her will blaze up, stubborn and resistant. She could not at that moment have done other than denied and resisted." She wonders if Léonce has ever spoken to her like that before, and whether she had submitted. Of course she had. But she could not understand why she had yielded, feeling as she then did. "Léonce, go to bed. I mean to stay out here. Don't speak to me like that again; I shall not answer you." Léonce, baffled, opens a bottle of wine, sits in the rocker on the gallery, and smokes two cigars. He offers her a glass; she declines. By the hour before dawn — "when the world seems to hold its breath" — her exuberance has ebbed and the need for sleep takes her. She gets up, cramped. "Are you coming in, Léonce?" "Yes, dear. Just as soon as I have finished my cigar." She has, for the first time, refused him.