"Marie! Glance inward. Do you see nothing that causes you to feel ashamed and foolish? Do you--_you_--fail to recognize the indecency of a woman of your mental age permitting herself to fancy that she is experiencing the authentic passions of youth? Are you capable of creating life? Can you love with unsullied memory? Have you the ideals of youth, the plasticity, the hopes, the illusions? Have you still even that power of desperate mental passion, so often subordinating the merely physical, of the mature woman who seeks for the last time to find in love what love has not? The final delusion. No, Marie. Your revivified glands have restored to you the appearance and the strength of youth, but, although you have played with a role that appealed to your vanity, to your histrionic powers--with yourself as chief audience--your natural desire to see if you could not be--to yourself, again--as young as you appear, you have no more illusion in your soul than when you were a withered old woman in Vienna." She looked at him with hostile but agonized eyes. "Your calculated brutality does not affect me in the least. And you are merely one more victim of convention--like those old women in New York. It never has been, therefore it never can be. Many women are not able to bear children, even in youth." "It is your turn to quibble. Tell me: until you were attracted to this young man--attracted, no doubt, because he was so unlike the European of your long experience--had you deviated from the conclusion, arrived at many years before, that you had had enough of love--of sex--to satisfy any woman? You implied as much to me a few moments since. I know the mental part of you so well that I am positive the mere thought would have disgusted you. If you had been starved all your life it would be understandable, but you had experimented and deluded yourself again and again--and you were burnt out when you came to Vienna to live--burnt out, not only physically but spiritually. Your imagination was as arid as a desert without an oasis. If any man had made love to you then, you would merely have turned on him your weary disillusioned eyes, or laughed cynically at him and yourself. Your keen aesthetic sense would have been shocked. You were playing then an important and ambitious role, you had the greatest political salon in Vienna--in Europe--and you went away to rest that you might continue to play it, not that you might feel fresh enough once more to have _liaisons_ like other foolish old women. . . . But the part you played then was a bagatelle to the one awaiting you now. With your splendid mental gifts, your political genius, your acquired statecraft, your wealth, and your restored beauty, you could become the most powerful woman in Europe. But only as my wife. Even you are not strong enough to play the part alone. There is too much prejudice against women to permit you to pull more than hidden strings. Masculine jealousy of women is