“My poet wanders, but yet stings.”
“So? Kneph was a god that boasted, or rather his spokesmen did, that he was the father of his mother. What economy! No need to be grateful to or love a mother; no need to wear a wife on the heart. The folly of a dark age by folly darkened in the mad attempt to lift up man without his purer better part.”
“How strange, Jew, whenever we touch a new belief, or an old one, new to us, we find peoples following an idea or ideal. There has been a crying through the world ever for a some one for pilgrim man to follow. How passing strange; our century wails the self-same cry; and somehow it always happens that this matter has something to do with woman. See; ‘Kneph’ was the monstrous birth of those who thought man superlative, and greatness to be by being all man. How sharply the devotion to the Madonna cuts across this! She was mother of the noblest, and man in the begetting left out. Oh, my head’s full of thoughts, but they tumble along toward my lips without system or leader. I talk like a madman, though I think like a Seraph.”
“I think, Sir Charleroy, that a healthy son of Adam sneering at all women, publicly, reproaches himself as being one who never knew a true one.”
“More javelins! I’d swear, anyhow, that if I’d been Adam, no winged serpent of gaudy colors and honey tongue could have lured me from Paradise, Eve or no Eve!”
“If thou hadst been there thou wouldst have been lonesome with the speechless herds; finding the new woman, would have loved her like the boy who mates just to see how it seems.”
“Oh, likely!”
“Then if thy ward or angel attempted to elope with the devil thou wouldst have gone along, too, from curiosity, as lad to a hippodrome, just to see the finish; or as thousands of men since Adam, tied to wayward women, have gone down with them to darkness, preferring hell with their idols to heaven without.”
“I suppose so. Oh, how strangely are the fates of men and women interwoven.”
“Then thou dost not now elect to live a hermit, without the companionship of the frail, fair and faithful sex which are said to double our joys?”