“It always strikes me, when I hear talk like yours,” said Mrs. Dallas presently, “that it is so much less generous and noble than it imagines itself to be. It’s the man, only, who frames the new code and the man, only, who is to enlarge himself and run two or three loves abreast.”
“Not at all. Marian is precisely as free as I am to love somebody else as well as me.”
“As free? Oh no,” said Mrs. Dallas, laughing softly. “Theoretically, perhaps, but not actually. Nature has seen to that. When women have babies and lose their figures it’s most unlikely that they’ll ever be given an opportunity to exercise their freedom. That fact in itself should make you reconsider your ideas about love. Own frankly that they apply only to men and don’t pretend to generosity. The only free women are the femmes galantes; and you’ll observe that they are seldom burdened with a nursery, and that they never grow fat.”
She touched, with an accuracy malignant in its clairvoyance, his subconscious awareness of Marian’s physical alteration. Something in him shrank away from her in fear and indignation. She was trying to make him see things from a false and petty standpoint, the standpoint of a woman of the world, a mere woman of the world—that world of shameful tolerances and cruel stupidities. “I don’t know anything about femmes galantes,” he said, “nor do I wish to. You misunderstand me if you think that by love I mean sensuality.”
With slightly lifted brows she looked out at the carnations; and had she been angry with him he could have felt less angry with her. He was, indeed, very angry with her when she remarked, tranquilly, “I don’t think you know what you mean by love.”
“I mean by love what Shelley meant by it,” Rupert declared.
"True love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding that grows bright
Gazing on many truths.
“I mean what all the true, great hearts of the world have meant by it,—poetry, rapture, religion; and they can only be sustained, renewed, created, by emotion, by passion, by sexual passion—if you like to call it by a name you imagine to be derogatory.” He felt himself warmed and sustained against the menace that emanated from her by the sound of his own familiar eloquence.
But Mrs. Dallas still tranquilly contemplated the carnations. “That’s the man’s point of view. The view of the artist, the creator. Perhaps there’s truth in it. Perhaps he can’t write his poems and paint his pictures without taking intoxicants. But it will never be the view of the woman. Mary Shelley will never really like it when Shelley makes love to Jane Clairmont; Marian will never like it when you make love to me. They’ll try to believe it’s the ideal, to please him, when they are the ones he is in love with; but when he is in love with other women they won’t go on believing.”
“That is their fault, their littleness, then. The wide, glorious outlook is theirs, too, if they choose to open their eyes. I don’t accept your antithesis for women,—humdrum respectability, roast mutton, milk pudding, or dissipation. I don’t believe that when a woman marries and becomes a mother she must turn her back on love.”