"For the protection of the community?"
"Perhaps. Still, it is not always pleasant to be a woman,—and yet think; a woman whose reason has been mistakenly developed at the expense of her capacity to enjoy being a woman, and who is forced at the same time to encounter the laws of Nature, and pay at the same time, the penalty of being a woman, and the penalty of knowledge. For, just so surely as we live, we must encounter love.—"
"You might take it out," interrupted the husband, "in feeling flattered that it takes so much to conquer such as you."
"So we might, but that, once conquered, neither man nor Nature has any further use for us, and regret, like art, is long. Not even you can deny," she exclaimed, sitting up in some excitement, and letting her cushions fall in a mess all about her, "that life is very unfair to women."
"Well, I don't see that. Physically it is a little rough on you, but there are compensations."
"I have never been able to discover them. Love itself is hard on a woman. It seems to stir a man's faculties healthily. They seem the stronger and more fit for it. It does not seem to uproot a man's whole being. Does it serve women in that way?"
"I bear witness that it makes some of you deucedly handsome. And I have heard that it makes some of you—good."
"Yes, as chastisement does. No, Life seems to have adjusted matters between men and women very badly, very unjustly."
"And yet, as this life is the only one we know we must adjust ourselves to it as we find it."
"No, no. We had better have accepted the thing as Nature gave it to us. We came into this world like beasts—why aren't we content to live like beasts, and make no pretenses? Women would have nothing to expect then, and there'd be no such thing as broken hearts. In spite of all the polish of civilization, man is simply bent on conquest. Woman is only one phase of the chase to him—a chase in which every active virile man is occupied from his cradle to his grave. You are the conquerors. We are simply the conquered."