ning on vacation when she has enjoyable discussions with Robert Lebrun. She starts to realize how different her life could be and what will happen if she has to continue her life as it is. As Edna's self-understanding blooms, she can no longer play her role as dutiful wife and mother and looks for ways to further expand her personal experiences and sexuality. When Robert goes to Mexico and Leonce travels on a long business trip, she takes her next fatal steps--a brief affair and, more important, moving out of her house. Without these walls to hold her in, she now has the freedom she believes she has desired. She can now move forward to her personal ambitions. "Every step she took toward relieving herself of obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual."
             The arousal to the reality of her situation consists of both pleasure and despair. She is overjoyed to feel her senses alive with emotional and physical love,
             For the first time she recognized anew the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a
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