They parted, however, because "they loved each other too much to ask for each other's lives." Meanwhile, "in patience and humility" they must wait "until after the Death of Society"—when they can be together. "How should I act," said Rosa, "if there were no such a thing as Society? I know how I should act. . . . I owe nothing to either man or woman. My name? My husband's name?—these belong to Society. . . . I will not leave my husband, because he is an old man, nor my daughters, because they are young; but if I give you a day of love, and again a day perhaps, whom shall I hurt? . . . My soul belongs to nobody: I—Rosa Christiansen—am my own. _My body is my soul's servant and friend, and by it I can know other souls as I know my own._ . . . Oh! oh! My soul is mine, and loves your soul!" We see that the "perfect woman" still kept on husband and home. And Smith, thus "proudly numbering himself among the angels," also found time for a secondary, but quite passionate, intercourse with one of the daughters of the house, who willingly gives him everything she has; because she loves him so much, he is all she wants. He "kissed her violently on the face . . . squeezed her ribs as tight as ever he dared," and replied without hesitation, "I love you as I love flowers and the trees and the sky. I love you because you are lovable as a wet or fine day is lovable. Why, yes, I must confess that I love you. . . . . I believe all men love a great many women. . . . I am a Bluebeard with a cellar full of wives. . . . You see, God hasn't created the woman yet who represents the whole of female perfection. Don't mistake me, Nathalia; I am not a beast. I don't run after women solely as women. . . . He began to stroke her head as he thought of all those past and bygone romances." And so on——! Strangely enough, "his heart was filled with deep and tender _respect for her_." More frequently, however, the novelists of this school seem to have gone back to the casual lusts of _Tom Jones_, with the rôle of hero and heroine reversed. There are many tales, almost romantic, of Sir Galahad waiting and tilting for Cleopatra or Mary Queen of Scots. Too often, marriage is merely evidence that "the _man_ has held out." Still we maintain that the modernists are really looking to the old-world "kept" woman for their ideal of more or less open and, as it were, established free love. We find clear, specific complaints against the new system: "They had lapsed into a relation which slowly from irregular grew regular. It was not marriage, but it was in the nature of marriage." Now, "after two and a half years . . . she had done wifely things for him. . . . Love and domestic economy; it was very like marriage after all."