look more like an animal than a woman?  When you have to snare the little tender birds because it is too much trouble for her to chew honest food, how much of a great warrior do you feel then?  You slay the tiger at the risk of your life; but who gets the striped skin you have run that risk for?  She takes it to lie on, and flings you the carrion flesh you cannot eat.  You fight because you think that your fighting makes her admire and desire you.  Fool:  she makes you fight because you bring her the ornaments and the treasures of those you have slain, and because she is courted and propitiated with power and gold by the people who fear you.  You say that I make a mere convenience of Adam:  I who spin and keep the house, and bear and rear children, and am a woman and not a pet animal to please men and prey on them!  What are you, you poor slave of a painted face and a bundle of skunk’s fur?  You were a man-child when I bore you.  Lua was a woman-child when I bore her.  What have you made of yourselves?

CAIN [letting his spear fall into the crook of his shield arm, and twirling his moustache] There is something higher than man.  There is hero and superman.

EVE.  Superman!  You are no superman:  you are Anti-Man:  you are to other men what the stoat is to the rabbit; and she is to you what the leech is to the stoat.  You despise your father; but when he dies the world will be the richer because he lived.  When you die, men will say, ’He was a great warrior; but it would have been better for the world if he had never been born.’  And of Lua they will say nothing; but when they think of her they will spit.

CAIN.  She is a better sort of woman to live with than you.  If Lua nagged at me as you are nagging, and as you nag at Adam, I would beat her black and blue from head to foot.  I have done it too, slave as you say I am.

EVE.  Yes, because she looked at another man.  And then you grovelled at her feet, and cried, and begged her to forgive you, and were ten times more her slave than ever; and she, when she had finished screaming and the pain went off a little, she forgave you, did she not?

CAIN.  She loved me more than ever.  That is the true nature of woman.

EVE [now pitying him maternally] Love!  You call that love!  You call that the nature of woman!  My boy:  this is neither man nor woman nor love nor life.  You have no real strength in your bones nor sap in your flesh.

CAIN.  Ha! [he seizes his spear and swings it muscularly].

EVE.  Yes:  you have to twirl a stick to feel your strength:  you cannot taste life without making it bitter and boiling hot:  you cannot love Lua until her face is painted, nor feel the natural warmth of her flesh until you have stuck a squirrel’s fur on it.  You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie.  You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.