"And this is the ideal you came here to build?" she asked, with scorn.
"Certainly. It is the essence of Socialism. In my next proclamation I shall declare for the freedom of love. Every great Socialist has preached this. Marriage and the family form the tap-root out of which the whole system of capitalism grew. The system can never be destroyed until the family is annihilated. I had thought you a woman whose brilliant intellect had faced this issue and broken the chains of a degrading bourgeois morality."
"The chains of love, I find, are very sweet," she interrupted, with dreamy tenderness.
"You talk this twaddle about romantic love? You, the leader of a revolution! Come, you are no longer a child. We are living now in the world of freedom and reality where men and women say the unspoken things and live to the utmost reach of their being, body and soul."
"Is it a world worth living in?" she asked.
"Was the old world of family life, of starvation and misery, worth living in?" Wolf retorted.
"Perhaps I might have said no an hour ago, but now that my lips have met my lover's the dream of the old family life, with its sanctity and purity, begins to call me. And something deep down within answers with a cry of joy. Why should you desire me, knowing that I thus love another?"
"You can love where you like," he snapped, as his big jaws came together. "I can get along without your love. I just want you—and I'm going to have you!"
"I'll die first!"
"We shall see. Time works wonders."