CASTI-PIANI--[_Still without looking at her, stroking her hair._] The best your superhuman sacrifices could do would be to turn my stomach. All my life I have loved tigresses. With bitches I was never anything but a stick of wood. My only consolation is that marriage, which you glorify so rapturously and for which bitches are bred, is a civilized institution. Civilized institutions arise only that they may be surmounted. The race will win beyond marriage just as it has surmounted slavery. The =free love-market=, where the tigress triumphs, is founded on a =primordial law= of =unalterable nature=. And how proud and high will woman stand in the world, so soon as she has conquered the right to sell herself, unbranded, at the highest price a man will bid for her! Illegitimate children will be better cared for then by the mother, than legitimate ones are now by the father. Then the pride and ambition of woman will no longer lie in the man who allots her her place, but in the world, where she struggles up to the highest position that her value can give her. Then what a glorious fresh vital sound the words “daughter of joy” will have! In the story of paradise it is written that Heaven endowed woman with the power to seduce. Woman seduces whom she will. Woman seduces when she will. She does not wait for love. And conventional society combats this hellish danger to our sacred civilization, by bringing woman up in an artificial darkness of mind and soul. The growing girl must not know what it means =to be a woman=. All our institutions might go to smash if she did! No hangman’s dodge is too base for the defense of conventional society! With every advance of civilization the love-business expands. The cleverer the world gets, the bigger is the love-market. And our celebrated civilization, in the name of morality, condemns these millions of daughters of joy to starvation, or robs them in the name of morality of their self-respect and life-vindication, yea, hurls them down to the level of beasts, all in the name of morality! How many centuries more will an =immorality= which cries to Heaven ravage this world with the sword and ax of morality! ELFRIEDE--[_Voicelessly whimpering._] Marry me! You stand above and beyond the world! For the first time, to-day I offer my hand to a man! CASTI-PIANI--[_Stroking her hair without looking at her._] Materialism! Commercialism!--What would the world know about morality at all, if man could commandeer love as he bosses politics! ELFRIEDE--I hope for no higher happiness from our marriage than the privilege of kneeling so before you all my life and listening to your words! CASTI-PIANI--Have you ever asked yourself what marriage means? ELFRIEDE--Till this moment I’ve had no occasion to do so. [_Rising._] Tell me! I shall do everything to come up to your requirements. CASTI-PIANI--[_Draws her onto his knee._] Come here, my child. I’ll explain it to you. [ELFRIEDE _is prudish for a moment_.] Please keep still.