Overman was silent a moment.
“Well, Frank, now you’ve put the question squarely, I’m going to be candid. I’m alarmed about you. The strain on your nerves is too great. This maggot of Socialism in your brain is the trouble. It is the mark of mental and moral breakdown, the fleeing from self-reliant individual life into the herd for help. You call it ‘brotherhood,’ the ‘solidarity of the race.’ Sentimental mush. It’s a stampede back to the animal herd out of which a powerful manhood has been evolved. This idea is destroying your will, your brain, your religion, and will finally sap the moral fiber of your character. It is the greatest sentimentalist.”
Gordon grunted.
“It’s funny how you have the faculty of putting the opposition in terms of its last absurdity.”
“Grunt if you like; I’m in dead earnest. You want to put on the brakes. You’ve struck the down grade. Socialism takes the temper out of the steel fiber of character. It makes a man flabby. It is the earmark of racial degeneracy. The man of letters who is poisoned by it never writes another line worth reading; the preacher who tampers with it ends a materialist or atheist; the philanthropist bitten by it, from just a plain fool, develops a madman; while the home-builder turns free-lover and rake under its teachings.”
“You’re a beauty to grieve over the loss to the world of home-builders!” Gordon cried, with scorn.
“Maybe my grief is a little strained—but really, Frank, I hate women, not because I don’t feel the need of their love—”
He drew the muscles of his big mouth together and looked thoughtfully out of the window with his single piercing eye.
“No; for the first time on that point I’ll make an honest, clean confession to you. I hate women because I’m afraid of them. I have a face that can stop an eight-day clock if I look at it hard enough; and yet beneath this hideous mask there’s a poor coward’s soul that worships beauty and hungers for love! I don’t allow women in this house because I can’t stand the rustle of their drapery. I don’t want one of them to get her claws into me. They can see through me in a minute. Women have an X-ray in their eyes. They can look through a brick wall, without going to see what’s on the other side. A man learns a thing is true by a painful process of reasoning. A woman knows a thing is so—because! She knows it thoroughly, too, from top to bottom. Whenever a woman looks at me I can feel her taking an X-ray photograph of the marrow of my bones.”
He wheeled suddenly and fixed his eye on Gordon.