He started at her answer, looked intently at her, and said deliberately, “I mean you, the One Woman, the only woman in the world to me.”
“I do not believe one word you have uttered, yet, I confess with shame, you have always fascinated me.”
“Why with shame? You have but one life to live. The years pass. Even beauty so rare as yours fades at last. The end is the grave and worms. Why dash from your beautiful lips the cup of life when it is full to the brim?”
“How skillfully you echo the dark thoughts that flit on devil wings through the soul, when we feel the bitterness of life’s failure, its contradictions and mysteries!” she exclaimed, closing her eyes for a moment and leaning back in her chair.
“You’ve often talked to me about the necessity of some sort of slavery for the Negro if he remain in America. I begin to believe that slavery is a necessity for all women.”
“I fail to see it, sir.”
“All women are born slaves and choose to remain so through life. It is curious to see you, a proud imperious woman, born of a race of unconquerable men, staggering to-day under the chains of four thousand years of conventional laws made by the brute strength of men. And you, if you struggle at all, beat your wings against the bars that the slaveholding male brute has built about your soul, fall back at last and give up to the will of your master. This too, when you hold in your simple will the key that would unlock your prison door and make you free. It’s a pitiful sight.”
“How shrewd a tempter!”
“There you are again. He who dares to tell you that you are of yourself a living human being, divinely free, is a tempter from the devil. You are thinking about eternity. Well, now is eternity. Live, stand erect, take a deep breath, and dare to be yourself and do what you please. That is what I do. The future is a myth.”
“Yes, I know the freedom of which you boast,” she quietly observed, “it is the freedom of lust. The return to nature you dream of is simply the fall downward into the dirt out of which a rational and spiritual manhood has grown. I feel and know this in spite of your handsome face and the fine ring of your voice.”