“Did the masters themselves ever respect it, or any other decrees of God they preached to the slaves?  Read history, and you will see.  They had their loves, their mistresses.  Read the newspapers, and you will find out whether they respect it to-day.  But they are very anxious to have you and me respect it and all the other Christian commandments, because they will prevent us from being discontented.  They say that we must be satisfied with the situation in this world in which God has placed us, and we shall have our reward in the next.”

She shivered slightly, not only at the ideas thus abruptly enunciated, but because it occurred to her that those others must be taking for granted a certain relationship between herself and Rolfe....  But presently, when the supper arrived, these feelings changed.  She was very hungry, and the effect of the food, of the hot coffee was to dispel her doubt and repugnance, to throw a glamour over the adventure, to restore to Rolfe’s arguments an exciting and alluring appeal.  And with renewed physical energy she began to experience once more a sense of fellowship with these free and daring spirits who sought to avenge her wrongs and theirs.

“For us who create there are no rules of conduct, no conventions,” Rolfe was saying, “we do not care for the opinions of the middle class, of the bourgeois.  With us men and women are on an equality.  It is fear that has kept the workers down, and now we have cast that off—­we know our strength.  As they say in Italy, il mondo e a chi se lo piglia, the world belongs to him who is bold.”

“Italian is a beautiful language,” she exclaimed.

“I will teach you Italian,” he said.

“I want to learn—­so much!” she sighed.

“Your soul is parched,” he said, in a commiserating tone.  “I will water it, I will teach you everything.”  His words aroused a faint, derisive echo:  Ditmar had wish to teach her, too!  But now she was strongly under the spell of the new ideas hovering like shining, gossamer spirits just beyond her reach, that she sought to grasp and correlate.  Unlike the code which Rolfe condemned, they seemed not to be separate from life, opposed to it, but entered even into that most important of its elements, sex.  In deference to that other code Ditmar had made her his mistress, and because he was concerned for his position and the security of the ruling class had sought to hide the fact....  Rolfe, with a cigarette between his red lips, sat back in his chair, regarding with sensuous enjoyment the evident effect of his arguments.

“But love?” she interrupted, when presently he had begun to talk again.  She strove inarticulately to express an innate feminine objection to relationships that were made and broken at pleasure.

“Love is nothing but attraction between the sexes, the life-force working in us.  And when that attraction ceases, what is left?  Bondage.  The hideous bondage of Christian marriage, in which women promise to love and obey forever.”