"You must be quite mad!" he said, warningly. "The Council will not overlook or forgive the use of a whiplash by a Monitor in a private interrogation. The very word you used—chastise. It is a brutally primitive word, a word out of the old books, a completely unscientific word that should be strictly excluded from the vocabulary of a Monitor. You will bring ruin and disgrace upon both of us. I will not be a party to it."
"Then go!" the gaunt woman cried, almost screaming the words. "I have always suspected you were nothing but a coward. Go, leave me. I can no longer endure the sight of you."
Without a word, his face as pale as the guard's had been, the young man turned and left the Observatory, the entrance panel closing behind him with a dull droning.
Grasping the whiplash firmly, the gaunt woman stepped quickly forward and tore the gag from the dark-eyed girl's mouth.
The girl recoiled a step, and stood for an instant motionless, her shoulders held straight and her eyes still blazing with anger. She did not seem to want to be the first to speak, for she kept her lips tightly compressed and her chin tilted defiantly. So fierce was her pride and uncompromising dignity that for the briefest instant the gaunt woman hesitated, as if some vestige of human feeling, of compassion and respect deep in her nature was urging her to be merciful. Then, as quickly as it had arisen, the impulse vanished, and the enraged Monitor unleashed a torrent of vituperation, her voice trembling with fury.
"Lascivious wanton, lewd temptress, abandoned harlot! How many men have you betrayed? How many men have you aroused unlawfully, tempting them to engage in acts of criminal carnality which all of the lessons of their childhood and early adolescence had given them the strength and wisdom to withstand? And the glandular injections, the wise, sane quieting of desire, its almost complete eradication in high-minded specialists in a hundred fields whose social dedication has made our society what it is—how dared you flaunt your brazen primitiveness openly and destroy what it has taken centuries to create?
"You have committed the most terrible of crimes. You have discovered in your wickedness that here and there, among a few men who are criminals at heart, the old, dangerous impulses are stirring again and perhaps have never been wholly subdued. And because they are stirring in you, because you are an abandoned creature lost to all shame, you have led many such men along pathways of gross sensuality, of unlawful desire. How many? A hundred, a thousand? You do not need to tell me. I can guess. It is always the woman who is most to blame, even when she consorts with men who are themselves criminals, as is this man here."
The girl spoke then, for the first time. She did not raise her voice and the anger which flamed in her eyes did not make her words come in a rush, as the Monitor's words had done. She spoke with dignity and each word was chosen with care and each word fell on the gaunt woman's ears with the force of a stinging rebuke.
"If you had wisdom and warmth and understanding you would have said, quite simply: 'He is a man—you are a woman. No woman can live without love and give to the world the best that is in her, and increase the world's store of radiance and tenderness and beauty. And no man can live without love and be complete in his inmost being, and have the courage of his beliefs and build proud new worlds on the ashes of a world such as this, a world which is dying."
"If our world is dying, you have helped to kill it!" the gaunt woman cried, her face dark with rage. "Do you hear? You have helped with your wantonness. You were caught making love in the forest like—like wild animals."