Why?  With a strange, half-cynical clearness he saw her, as the obstacle that she was, in Ashe’s life and career.  For Ashe—­supposing he, Cliffe, persuaded her—­there would be no doubt a first shock of wrath and pain—­then a sense of deliverance.  For her, too, deliverance!  It excited his artist’s sense to think of all the further developments through which he might carry that eager, plastic nature.  There would be a new Kitty, with new capacities and powers.  Wasn’t that justification enough?  He felt himself a sculptor in the very substance of life, moulding a living creature afresh, disengaging it from harsh and hindering conditions.  What was there vile in that?

The argument pursued itself.

“The modern judges for himself—­makes his own laws, as a god, knowing good and evil.  No doubt in time a new social law will emerge—­with new sanctions.  Meanwhile, here we are, in a moment of transition, manufacturing new types, exploring new combinations—­by which let those who come after profit!”

Little delicate, distinguished thing!—­every aspect of her, angry or sweet, sad or wilful, delighted his taste and sense.  Moreover, she was his deliverance, too—­from an ugly and vulgar entanglement of which he was ashamed.  He shrank impatiently from memories which every now and then pursued him of the Ricci’s coarse beauty and exacting ways.  Kitty had just appeared in time!  He felt himself rehabilitated in his own eyes.  Love may trifle as it pleases with what people call “law”; but there are certain aesthetic limits not to be transgressed.

The Ricci, of course, was wild and thirsting for revenge.  Let her!  Anxieties far more pressing disturbed him.  What if he tempted Kitty to this escapade—­and the rough life killed her?  He saw clearly how frail she was.

But it was the artificiality of her life, the innumerable burdens of civilization, which had brought her to this!  Women were not the weaklings they seemed, or believed themselves to be.  For many of them, probably for Kitty, a rude and simple life would mean not only fresh mental but fresh physical strength.  He had seen what women could endure, for love’s or patriotism’s sake!  Make but appeal to the spirit—­the proud and tameless spirit—­and how the flesh answered!  He knew that his power with Kitty came largely from a certain stoicism, a certain hardness, mingled, as he would prove to her, with a boundless devotion.  Let him carry it through—­without fears—­and so enlarge her being and his own!  And as to responsibilities beyond, as to their later lives—­let time take care of its own births.  For the modern determinist of Cliffe’s type there is no responsibility.  He waits on life, following where it leads, rejoicing in each new feeling, each fresh reaction of consciousness on experience, and so links his fatalist belief to that Nietzsche doctrine of self-development at all costs, and the coming man, in which Cliffe’s thought anticipated the years.