“It has,” she declared, but with a curious curve of her lip that chilled him.
“What are you driving at?” he asked suspiciously.
“This book has given me the key that unlocked for me, for the first time, the riddle of my physical being. It has shown me the physical basis of love, just as I knew before there was a physical basis of the soul.”
“What did you understand the book to teach?” he asked.
“Simply that love is based in its material life, on the lobe of the brain which develops at the base of a child’s head near the age of thirteen. That this lobe of the brain is the sex centre, and love is impossible until it develops. That this centre of new powers at the base of the skull is a physical magnet. That when a man and woman approach each other, who are by nature mates, these magnetic centres are disturbed by action and reaction, and that this disturbance develops the second elemental passion called love. The first elemental passion, hunger, has for its end the preservation of the individual; while love finds its fulfillment in the preservation of the species. Love finds its satisfaction in the child, its ardour cools, and it dies, unless kept alive by the social conventions of the family, which are not based merely on this violent emotion, but also on unity of tastes, which produce the sense of comradeship. For these reasons it is possible to fall violently in love more than once, and there are dozens of people who possess this magnetic power over us and would respond to it violently if we only came in social contact with them. That the romantic bombast about the possibility of but one love in life, and that of supernatural origin, is twaddle, and leads to false ideals. Have I given the argument?”
“Exactly. But what do you deduce from it?”
“Freedom!”
“Good!” he cried, licking his lips.
“Freedom from superstitions about love,” she answered, “and positive knowledge of its elemental beauty which Nature reveals. In short, I no longer wonder and brood over your charm for me. I know exactly what it means, and how it might occur again and again with another and another. I have simply throttled it in a moment by an act of my will, based on this knowledge.”
“You amaze me.”