"... the day will come when we, too, will demand it as our right--demand the chance to live our own lives as we choose and as we can, without being held the worse on that account. Of course, I know that this is not an ideal, but merely a makeshift meant to serve until at last a time comes which recognizes the right of every human being to continue its life through the race." Her justification is the characteristic one: "I have, after all, lived for a time during those few years of youth that are granted us human beings only once in our lifetime, and that will never, never come back again. What have these other ones got out of their enforced duty and virtue except bitterness--bitterness and emptiness? I have, after all, felt the fullness of life within me while there was still time, and I don't regret it!" The clash with her father whom she loves tenderly she accepts as inevitable in spite of the pain it must bring them both. The ecstasy of a great vision softens to the note of personal loss as she leaves him: "Yes--I do pity you, father! Don't think my heart is made of stone. The sorrow I have done you cannot be greater than the one I feel within myself at this moment, when perhaps I see you for the last time! But how can I help that I am the child of a time that you don't understand? We have never wanted to hurt each other, of course--but I suppose it is the law of life, that nothing new can come into the world without pain--" Because Karen advocates a course generally denoted by the term (of wretched connotation) free love, she is not to be confused with those of lesser fineness who are fighting at her side. For instance, with Stanley Houghton's heroine in Hindle Wakes. Anyone who sees in Karen another Fanny Hawthorne, has failed to understand Karen's position. She is a woman of culture and of ideals in all matters of life, and especially in that of the sex relationship. "I have given myself, ..." she says, "to the man I loved, firmly determined to remain faithful to him unto death." This is a far cry from Fanny's reply to Alan: "Love you? Good heavens, of course not! Why on earth should I love you? You were just someone to have a bit of fun with. You were an amusement--a lark." To Karen the relationship is justified only by depth of passion, and she entered it with as great a solemnity and glow of consecration as did ever a serious woman a church-made marriage. To the many camp-followers of "established" feminism, those who don or doff their principles with the transient fashion,--to them Karen must seem a humorous, if not a pitiable figure. For she dares to have beliefs and gallantly cleaves to them.