“What preconceptions?”
“Just because Crimtyphon’s sports are strange to you, you murder him—and you would like to murder me.”
“Sports! That diabolical cruelty.”
“Oh, you’re sentimental!” said Oceaxe contemptuously. “Why do you need to make such a fuss over that man? Life is life, all the world over, and one form is as good as another. He was only to be made a tree, like a million other trees. If they can endure the life, why can’t he?”
“And this is Ifdawn morality!”
Oceaxe began to grow angry. “It’s you who have peculiar ideas. You rave about the beauty of flowers and trees—you think them divine. But when it’s a question of taking on this divine, fresh, pure, enchanting loveliness yourself, in your own person, it immediately becomes a cruel and wicked degradation. Here we have a strange riddle, in my opinion.”
“Oceaxe, you’re a beautiful, heartless wild beast—nothing more. If you weren’t a woman—”
“Well”—curling her lip—“let us hear what would happen if I weren’t a woman?”
Maskull bit his nails.
“It doesn’t matter. I can’t touch you—though there’s certainly not the difference of a hair between you and your boy-husband. For this you may thank my ‘foreign preconceptions.’... Farewell!”