"Perfect love will cast out fear. The world is large. The soul is large. Lift up your head and be yourself. You said to me in this room once you were not afraid." "Yes; I had not kissed you then, or felt the bliss and agony of your strong arms about me. Now, I am afraid of you"--her voice sank to a tense whisper--"and I am afraid of myself!" He seized her hand. "You will take the risk. You are cast in such a mould," he said, with ringing assurance. "You are the chosen one, my dauntless comrade in a holy crusade. We will call womanhood from enslavement to form, ceremony and tradition, in which the brute nature of man has bound her, out and up into her larger self, the mate and equal of man." She shook her head, and her hair began to fall in waving ringlets about her forehead, temples and neck. "I am afraid. I cannot permit this sacrifice on your part. You must break with society, your friends, your father, your past, your wife and children. I must brave the sneers of gossip and the tongue of slander. It will destroy your work and end your career." "It will give it grander scope. Back of the dead forms of the age, the living heart of a new life is beating. It will burst its bounds as surely as the dead limbs in that park will in spring put on their shimmering satin which Nature is now weaving in her mills beneath the sod. You and I will open the doors of the soul and body to a new and wider life. And, after all, the body is the soul. I know it as I drink the madness of your beauty." "I do not fear the world so much, I shrink from striking a woman a mortal blow. I know what it is to love now," she insisted sadly. "Ruth and I have grown out of each other's life. Besides, you do not know her. Beneath her little form are caged powers you have not guessed," he replied, with a curious smile. "I groan and bellow in pain until you can hear me a mile. It is my way. She can take her place on the cold slab of a surgeon's table, feel the crash of steel through nerve and muscle and artery without a groan. I might rave, commit suicide or murder in a tempest of passion, but mark my word, she will lift her lithe figure erect and, with soft, even footstep, go her way." He said this with a ring of tender pride, as though she were his child about whom he was boasting. "I believe you love her still," Kate said, flushing with a look of surprise. "You know her love could not live in the fires with which my eyes are consuming you," he said with intensity. She lowered her gaze and glanced uneasily about as though afraid of him.