For woman is beautiful . . . to man.  She is sweet to his tongue, and fragrance in his nostrils.  She is fire in his blood, and a thunder of trumpets; her voice is beyond all music in his ears; and she can shake his soul that else stands steadfast in the draughty presence of the Titans of the Light and of the Dark.  And beyond his star-gazing, in his far-imagined heavens, Valkyrie or houri, man has fain made place for her, for he could see no heaven without her.  And the sword, in battle, singing, sings not so sweet a song as the woman sings to man merely by her laugh in the moonlight, or her love-sob in the dark, or by her swaying on her way under the sun while he lies dizzy with longing in the grass.

I have died of love.  I have died for love, as you shall see.  In a little while they will take me out, me, Darrell Standing, and make me die.  And that death shall be for love.  Oh, not lightly was I stirred when I slew Professor Haskell in the laboratory at the University of California.  He was a man.  I was a man.  And there was a woman beautiful.  Do you understand?  She was a woman and I was a man and a lover, and all the heredity of love was mine up from the black and squalling jungle ere love was love and man was man.

Oh, ay, it is nothing new.  Often, often, in that long past have I given life and honour, place and power for love.  Man is different from woman.  She is close to the immediate and knows only the need of instant things.  We know honour above her honour, and pride beyond her wildest guess of pride.  Our eyes are far-visioned for star-gazing, while her eyes see no farther than the solid earth beneath her feet, the lover’s breast upon her breast, the infant lusty in the hollow of her arm.  And yet, such is our alchemy compounded of the ages, woman works magic in our dreams and in our veins, so that more than dreams and far visions and the blood of life itself is woman to us, who, as lovers truly say, is more than all the world.  Yet is this just, else would man not be man, the fighter and the conqueror, treading his red way on the face of all other and lesser life—­for, had man not been the lover, the royal lover, he could never have become the kingly fighter.  We fight best, and die best, and live best, for what we love.

I am that one man.  I see myself the many selves that have gone into the constituting of me.  And ever I see the woman, the many women, who have made me and undone me, who have loved me and whom I have loved.

I remember, oh, long ago when human kind was very young, that I made me a snare and a pit with a pointed stake upthrust in the middle thereof, for the taking of Sabre-Tooth.  Sabre-Tooth, long-fanged and long-haired, was the chiefest peril to us of the squatting place, who crouched through the nights over our fires and by day increased the growing shell-bank beneath us by the clams we dug and devoured from the salt mud-flats beside us.