"I intend to be a whole club in myself."
"Appalling! But what do you mean by that cryptic assertion? I told you that I could understand anything you chose to explain, but, as they say out here, I am not good at guessing."
"I am working out a theory of my own. It has been demonstrated that labor, capital, all the known forces, are far stronger when concentrated and organized. I believe in concentrating all the faculties about a will strong enough not only to conquer life but all the inherited weaknesses that beset one daily within. That is a minor matter, however. I believe that our higher faculties were given to us for no purpose but to create within ourselves an individual strength that will add to the sum of strength in the world. It is not necessary to proclaim this strength from the house-tops, nor to search for windmills—a positive enemy it would leap at automatically—nor even to seek to improve the world by all the tried and generally futile devices. It is enough to be. I alone may not add greatly to this subjective strength of the world; but think what life would be did each individual succeed in making himself but one degree less strong than God himself! It may be my destiny to make propaganda without noise; but if not, the achievement of absolute strength in myself will move the world forward to its millennium one-millionth part of a degree at least. For that will be the real millennium—when there shall be no despicable weakness in the world, no moral rottenness, when each individual shall rely upon himself alone, independent of the environment from which the majority to-day draw everything good and bad, their happiness or misery. Nothing will ever purge human nature but the triumph of the higher faculties, a triumph accomplished by an unswervingly cultivated and jealously maintained strength."
"I don't deny that your millennium has its points, but would that not be rather a hard world? What of love, the interdependence of the sexes, and all the other human relations?"
"It is love and interdependence that cause all the misery of the world; they would be the very first things I should relegate among the minor influences, did I wield the sceptre for an hour. To women, at least, all unhappiness comes from the superstition that love—any sort—is all. Of course there would be marriage, but of deliberate choice, and after a long and purely platonic friendship, in which all the horrid little failings that do most to dissever could be recognized and weighed. Free love and experimental matrimony are mere excuses for the sort of sensuality that is shallow and inconstant."
"Ah! Then you would permit love to your married pair after they had probed each other's minds and mannerisms for a year or two? That is a concession I hardly expected."
Isabel shrugged her shoulders. "I am neither an idiot nor blind. Heaven knows I have seen enough of reckless passion and its consequences. The equipment of the mortal proves him to be the slave of the race, but at least he need not remain the blind and ridiculous slave he is at present. If I had married that man no doubt I should have loved him more frantically than ever for a time. But that would have passed, left me resentful of bondage, of the surrender of self. There, above all, is the reason I shall never marry. Impersonally, I believe in marriage, or rather accept it, but I purpose to stand apart as a complete individual, and subtly to teach others to drag strength out of the great body of force in which we move, until they realize that in time mankind may feed those creative fires, becoming, who knows, stronger than the great first cause itself."
"And I have been called an egoist," murmured Gwynne. "I feel a mere—well—Leghorn—beside this sublime determination to sit upon the throne of God and administer to both kingdoms. All the same, my fair cousin, I believe that it takes a man and a woman to complete the ego. I incline to the picturesque belief that they were originally united, and halved in some—well, say when Earth and its atmosphere became two distinct parts. No doubt it was a judgment for having accomplished too much evil in that formidable combination. Who knows but that may be the secret of the fall of man; the uneven progress of human nature may be towards the resumption of that state, only to be attained when we have conquered the worst in ourselves and become pure spirit."
"That fits my own theory, for I believe that the two parts of what should have been a perfect whole were cut in two for their sins, and that reunion will come only when each has absolutely mastered the human evil in him and freed the spiritual, but this he can only accomplish alone—"
"Don't quote Tolstoi to me! He waited until he was old and cold to hurl anathema against the human passions. Theories upon love by a man long past his prime are as valueless as those of a girl."