"Anna Erivan, you are superb to me. I think—there is a bit of madness or martyrdom about two coming together this way. I didn't understand what my story could mean to you, until I thought of it the other way—as if you brought it to me—"
"I have nothing interesting like that," she said with a smile. "I think if I brought you a story like that, it would change me in your eyes."
"I would not let it," he said.
"Your will could not save me," she answered. "A man might say and believe (until his own heart was touched) that a woman has all the rights of man to diffuse herself before her mate arrives, but in his own heart, he would see her differently if she did. Oh, it is not the pressure of centuries of man's possession of women—not altogether his instinctive sense of conservation. That's only physical. There is something back even of the patriarch idea about women. She cannot give herself to one and be the same again—not even in her own mind. There is something sacred about that, which men do not know—and which only great women know—"
"Then you think a man big enough to place a woman on the same moral footing as himself has not come to the end of the subject?"
"I think when men are tolerant enough for that, they will be great enough to accept woman's idea of herself, which is greater still."
"What is it—can you tell me?"
"Just so long as a woman has not the spiritual power to formulate her ideal of the one man of her heart, she must accept the nearest, the first or second or third, and must suffer her horrors of mis-mating. But all the time her dream is forming, literally making the one who belongs to her and no other. It builds out of her suffering. It comes out of agony and diffusion, even out of promiscuity. It is the ascent of woman's character into an integrity which can only be touched by one human being. It is not touched if he does not come—"
Romney stood before her, looking into two flashing points her eyes had become.
"It does not play a fortnight—to find out if the man is the one. It does not play at all. It does not suffer from waiting because it does not live in sex. It does not meet its own on any basis of sex—not at first, even though it has passions powerful enough to fire the world—"