"Dare? I will dare to turn you out of this house. I have chosen the man, and made love to him as his equal. His scruples as your friend bound him. They do not bind me. Thank yourself if this means a tragedy. You challenged the world in your strength. You proclaimed freedom in comradeship. Under the old laws of life, this man would have cut his right arm off rather than betray you. You invited him here. Has he no rights--have I no rights you must respect under such conditions?" He ignored her question and continued to look at her in stubborn, curious silence. "Do you know what you are saying?" he asked, brusquely. "Certainly. Repeating to you the secrets you have taught me." "Well, I'll teach you something more before this drama has ended, young woman," he said, with a touch of ice in his tones. She gave an angry toss of her head and cried with sneering emphasis: "Indeed!" "Yes. I'll show you, if you push me to it, what a return to the freedom of nature really means. I, too, have had some illuminations in the past months." She laughed again. "Ah, Frank, you are a born preacher, and your threats are scarcely melodramatic; they are merely idiotic." The gray eyes grew somber. He drew his right arm up until its muscles stood a huge twisted knot, fairly bursting through his sleeve, seized her hand roughly and held it with iron violence on his arm. "It's worth your while to take note of that," he said, steadily disregarding her angry effort to withdraw her hand. "It's made out of threads of steel--that muscle. Few men are my equal. I am talking to you in the insolence of physical strength that proclaims me a king--a savage viking, if you like, but none the less a king." She attempted again to free her arm from his brutal grip. "Be still," he growled. "I feel throbbing in my veins to-day the blood of a thousand savage ancestors who made love to their women with a club and dragged them to their caves by the hair--yes, and more, the beat of impulses that surged there with wild power before man became a man." With a sob of rage, she tore herself from his grasp. "Oh, you brute!" she cried, stiffening her figure to its full height, her dark-red hair falling in ruffling ringlets about her ears and neck, as she rubbed her arm where his hand had left the blue finger-prints. "I warn you," he said, his voice sinking lower and lower into a mere growl. "I am your husband. You are my wife. Whatever may have been my dreams, I'm awake now. Man once aroused is an animal with teeth and claws and Titanic impulses, huge and fateful forces that crush and kill all that comes between him and his two fierce elemental desires, hunger and love." The splendid form of the woman shook with anger. Her eyes ablaze, her cheeks scarlet, her voice sobbing and breaking with wrath, she said: "And did you call it that when you threw your little wife into the street for me? Is this your boasted freedom--freedom for man's desires alone?"