OCEANA. Oh, don't I! My dear boy, there is nothing about men that I don't know. I have read Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis... I know it all. I know it as a physician knows it. I can read a man's diseases in his complexion... I can read his vices in his eyes. Don't you see?
FREDDY. [Drops his eyes.] I see!
OCEANA. Don't think that I am despising you, dear boy. I know the world you have lived in.
FREDDY. But what can I do?
OCEANA. You can go away, and make a man of yourself. Go West, get out into the open. Learn to ride and hunt... harden your muscles and expand your chest. Until then you're not fit to be the father of any woman's child!
FREDDY. Drop college, you mean?
OCEANA. Be your own college! The idea of trying to build a brain in a body that's decaying! How could you stand it? Don't you ever feel that you are boiling over... that you must have something upon which you can wreak yourself? Don't you feel that you'd like to tame a horse, or to sail a boat in a storm? Don't you ever read about adventures?
FREDDY. Yes, I read about them.
OCEANA. And don't you ever feel that you must experience them? That you must face some kind of danger... do something that you can look back on with pride? Why, see... six years ago there came to our island three war-canoes full of savages... cannibals they were. If father and I hadn't been there, they'd have wiped our people out. And do you think I'd give up the memory of that struggle?
FREDDY. What happened?