"It was a theory I had no intention of advancing. I think for myself and pay no more attention to the excessive virtue bred by the years than to that equally illogical repentance or awakening of a woman's moral nature when the man has ceased to charm or has disappeared. That is a mere process, and no augury of future behavior. But you are always at your best when you go off at half-cock like that! What I meant was that woman has degenerated, not through passion but through ages of the exercise of her pettier and meaner qualities. In some, these qualities lead to malignancy, in the majority, no doubt, to frivolity--still worse, to my puritanical inheritance--and they are utterly commonplace of outlook. Matrimony keeps these qualities in constant exercise, because the ego loses its independent life, its habit of meditation, and is pin-pricked twenty times a day. It is by these qualities that woman chains man to the earth, not by her human passions. I am quite willing to concede that passion is magnificent." Gwynne ground his teeth. He had never encountered anything so incongruous as this beautiful vital superbly fashioned girl talking of passion in precisely the same tone as she would have talked of chickens. He felt the primitive man's impulse to beat her black and blue and then make her his creature. As Isabel turned her eyes she was astonished at what she saw in his. Gwynne's eyes were blazing. There was a dark color in his face, and even his mouth, somewhat heavy, and generally set, was half open. She fancied that so he looked when on a platform facing the enemy, and thoroughly awake. "What are you angry about?" she asked, calmly. "That I devote myself to my sex instead of to yours? They need me more than any leader they have evolved so far. There are millions of women of your sort. I want nothing that your sex has left to offer. I will find a happiness unimaginable to you, in living absolutely within myself and independent of all that life, so far, has to give." Then Gwynne exploded, and forgot himself. He flung himself forward, and catching her upper arms in the grip of a vise shook her until her teeth clacked together. "Damn you! Damn you!" he stammered. "What you want is to be the squaw of one of your own Indians!" "Let me go!" gasped Isabel, furious, and in sharp physical pain. "Do you want to turn the boat over? Have you gone mad? I'll _kick_ you!" "Good!" said Gwynne, releasing her, and sitting back. "That is the only feminine speech you have made since I have known you. I make no apology. You need never speak to me again. Set me ashore over there. I can take the train when it comes along." "You pinched me! You hurt me!" cried, Isabel in wrath and dismay. "I hate you!" "And your sentiments are cordially returned. Will you put me on shore?" "I don't care what you do. You hurt me! You hurt me!" And Isabel dropped her head into her arms and burst into a wild tempest of tears, like a child that has had its first whipping.