“But may you not be mine in a nobler way than the cheap surrender to our senses? We can love and suffer and wait. You love me. It is enough.”
“But, Kate, my dear, there can be no middle course between right and wrong, a lie and the truth.”
She fixed on him an intense look.
“Have you told her?”
“Yes, and we have separated as man and wife. She leaves for Florida for the winter. She has agreed at my request to secure a divorce, and you and I will marry under the new forms of Social freedom. Our union will be a prophecy of the revolution that shall redeem society.”
“You are doing a great wrong,” she protested, her full red lips drawn with pain. “When I think of your wife and children, of her tears and reproaches, I am sick with fear.”
“Perfect love will cast out fear. The world is large. The soul is large. Lift up your head and be yourself. You said to me in this room once you were not afraid.”
“Yes; I had not kissed you then, or felt the bliss and agony of your strong arms about me. Now, I am afraid of you”—her voice sank to a tense whisper—“and I am afraid of myself!”
He seized her hand.
“You will take the risk. You are cast in such a mould,” he said, with ringing assurance. “You are the chosen one, my dauntless comrade in a holy crusade. We will call womanhood from enslavement to form, ceremony and tradition, in which the brute nature of man has bound her, out and up into her larger self, the mate and equal of man.”