Marathe and Kate at Ryle's (pp. 780–781)
‘I tried to leave the soft-head and cerebro-spinally incontinent woman, m’épouse au future, behind at the hôpital of grave nature and to wheel off into my new life of uncaged acceptance and choice. […] But I had travelled no more than several revolutions of the fauteuil when the old despair of before choosing this no-skull creature rose up once again inside me. Within several revolutions there was no point again and no legs, and only fear of the pain that made me not choose. Pain rolled me backwards to this woman, my wife.’
Context
The failed escape, measured in wheel-revolutions: a few turns of the fauteuil away from the deformed woman and the despair is back at full force. Kate hears codependency ("It's like the clinical depression was a shotgun nudging you down the wedding aisle"); Marathe hears the structure of his own salvation — without her to choose over himself, there is nothing but the cage.