I’m not going to push it, she thought. Patience. Be refreshingly trustful and libertarian. Simply wait for him to get in touch. He’d probably gone to buy that book and would call her about meeting up, so he could give it to her. You couldn’t pick out a book for somebody you knew to have been paralyzed by yearning, someone with whom you’d moreover had congress, if you didn’t mean something by it.

Don’t push it now, just wait.

Christmas came, the second Christmas she had spent doing nothing but dwelling on her own feelings, her longing and her lack of appetite for life.

New Year came. She thought positively.

Twelfth Night came. She thought long-term. Don’t push it. Patience. Just wait. He had chosen a book for her and you didn’t do that without feeling and meaning something. He had appreciated their conversation at the Christmas party. He was still in Malmö. There was an endless succession of public holidays to get through.

She thought the next step would have to be taken with great care after feelings had been so raw. They could not rush into anything this time and they could not make a casual mess of it. This time it had to be done properly and their contact had to be fostered once it had at last been made. So it was only natural that he did not get in touch.

Fifteen days into January and a telephone as silent as the grave. She found that she was furious with him. How could he say he had picked out a book in a shop window for her if he did not want something else as well? One simply couldn’t do that with their history still fresh in the memory.

The girlfriend chorus said: You aren’t familiar enough with human guilt-control mechanisms, intricate, sensitive, continually duping our “real feelings.” They’re intended as a salve with dual effect, relieving the conscience of the one and the torment of the other. They only become cruel when somebody decides they should be converted into action. The words are performative, said the girlfriend chorus’s academic element; one of them was writing a thesis on J. L. Austin. They are their own action; the utterance of the words of guilt control is what constitutes the guilt control. They are not intended to represent a reality outside language. That is not their intention, any more than the question “You won’t ever leave me, will you?” is about the future rather than the present.

When the girlfriend chorus persisted, Ester said it was doubtless right but she had to believe something else to be the case in order to hold out. If there were the least chance of a more positive interpretation she planned to stick with that until she was disproved.

Sixteen days into January, she called him. He did not answer but of course he could see from his display that she had rung and would therefore ring back shortly.

Two days passed. He didn’t ring back.

There was nothing she could demand of him to alleviate her anguish. Talking for twenty minutes at a cocktail party did not amount to any kind of commitment. Picking out a book one intended to buy for a person one had slept with almost a year ago only meant that one was not hostile.

Why did she nonetheless consider that some kind of obligation had been placed on him? Why did she feel that her brokenheartedness was legitimate?

Ester was completely clear on the following:

Hugo Rask was not under any obligation to love her.

Being loved was not a right.

It was stuffy old honor culture that thought courting a woman or sleeping with her imposed obligations, and even more so if you came back after the first sexual act for a further two nights’ union of the flesh. But that was the way she thought, even so. She saw very plainly that this was how her logic worked. Was she taking refuge in an outdated gender role particularly suited to the purpose of dealing with her disappointment? Shouldn’t she rise above such fusty old notions about man’s duties to the weaker sex?

She tried turning the idea round and wrote an article on the topic, which she sent to a periodical. Honor culture should not be understood as a deliberate curtailment of freedom but as the result of an observation of something entirely fundamental in human life: the fact that one has no right to run away from the wonderful thing that formed between two people who have come close to each other. Out of this sense of propriety, the old norms of behavior had developed organically, she wrote, to prevent the suffering that results from lack of clarity and equality. Having intercourse with another person brings responsibility onto the scene, the deeper and more naked the intercourse, the more far-reaching the injunction. Honor culture had understood this and regulated it. Its aim was hardly to sentence two individuals to carry on meeting against their wills just because they had started, the way it was rigidly interpreted today, nor to keep women suppressed and supervised. Those were side effects. The crux of the matter was to induce people not to start associating in the first place if one party knew that he did not wish to be involved with the other but planned to toss her aside.

These codes for the conduct of the flesh and the emotions were not about honor, she wrote. Honor was a rationalization, after the event. It was actually an attempt to protect people from becoming mere playthings for thoughtless others. Do not hold out any prospects to the hopeful party that you know will not materialize!

Over time, the codes had been uncoupled from their original insight and had come to be falsely interpreted as demands for female virtue and decency. But the principles would have been gender-neutral if the world had been, too. They were merely a defense against what the superior position inflicts on the inferior. The holder of the superior position is the one with least to lose. And in order to implant this shield against negligence and thoughtlessness, a detailed structure of regulation was created in which everyone knew what was expected at every stage. Chastity became one component and a spontaneous result, but it was not where all this originated. Honor culture was about entirely different matters. It was instituted as a defense against people willfully helping themselves to other people.

The article was refused.