“When I shrink from anything you wish me to do, or fail in my undertaking to serve you loyally, I give you leave to finish me off in any way you please!” she said, calmly—“and without warning!”
He smiled—but his eyes were sombre with thought.
“Sit down,” he said, and signed to her to take a chair near the window. “I will tell you as much as I can—as much as I myself know. It is briefly said.”
He watched her closely, as, in obedience to his wish, she seated herself, and he noted the new and ardent brilliance in her eyes which gave them a look of youthful and eager vitality. Then he drew up another chair and sat opposite to her. Outside the window the garden had a wintry aspect—the flowerbeds were empty,—the trees were leafless, and the summits of the distant Alps peered white and sharp above a thick, fleece-like fog which stretched below.
“You say you are out of love with life,” he began. “And this, only because you have been spared the common lot of women—the so-called ‘love’ which would have tied you to one man to be the drudge of his coarse passions till death. Well!—I admit it is the usual sort of thing life offers to the female sex,—but to be ‘out of love’ with the stupendous and beautiful work of God because this commonest of commonplace destinies has been denied you, is—pardon my brusquerie,—mere folly and unreasoning sentiment. However, I am taking you at your word,—you are ‘out of love’ with life, and you are not afraid of death. Therefore, to me you are not a woman—you are a ‘subject’:—you put it very clearly just now when you said that I need you as the vivisector needs the animal he experiments upon—that is perfectly correct. I repeat, that for my purpose, you are not a woman,—you are simply an electric battery.”
She looked up, amazed—then laughed as gaily as a child.
“An electric battery!” she echoed. “Oh, dear, oh, dear! I have imagined myself as many things, but never that!”
“And yet that is what you really are,” he said, unmoved by her laughter. “It is what we all are, men and women alike. Our being is composed of millions of cells, charged with an electric current which emanates from purely material sources. We make electricity to light our houses with—and when the battery is dry we say the cells need recharging—a simple matter. Youth was the light of your house of clay—but the cells of the battery are dry—they must be recharged!”
She sat silent for a moment, gazing at him as though seeking to read his inmost thought. His dark, fine eyes met hers without flinching.
“And you,—you propose to recharge them?” she said, slowly and wonderingly.