Edna began to feel like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul.
I can’t stand real things. If I could put up with reality I wouldn’t be in here.
At an earlier Awakening, she had decided that reality was whatever happened, whatever she perceived.
Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.