“Louis,” she burst out, “I’d rather be a Puritan, I think—­and be all dead and dried up like Aunt Janet, than—­than—­what you call bowled over.  I’d loathe that anything should have me; put me in chains; make me do things!  Louis—­” her voice dropped to a meek whisper, “it isn’t that—­that—­beastly sort of thing makes me love you, is it?  Makes me love to buy flowers and books for you, and make food for you, and be near you?  Louis—­just because you’re a man and I’m a girl?”

“Of course it is, you little silly,” he said complacently.

“Then I won’t!” she cried hotly.  “I won’t do a thing because something inside me, over which I have no control, says I’ve got to!  I hate it!  It’s a chain—­I’m—­a thing with a will, not just a bundle of instincts.”

He looked at her queerly, laughed a little and said nothing.  She got the terrible idea that he knew more than she did, that something was weaving a net which all the while she thought was beautiful devotion when it was really something that was getting entangled in her arms and legs so that she could not move as she wished.

“I resent it!” she cried, suddenly, starting up as though she would push the wall through and escape into the street.  “I can’t bear chains, Louis.”

“Then commit suicide,” he said, stretching his hand out to her.  “Even then some of these mad psychics say that that doesn’t kill the thing you’re escaping from.  They say you die with an appetite and are so earthbound that you come to life again with it still about you.  Lord, if I died now I’d come back and be the bung of a whisky barrel—­and you—­”

“Louis, don’t,” she cried, staring up wildly.  “It’s beastly.  Oh it’s better not to understand anything at all!  Do you know, I believe lots of people who stop to think resent these tyrannies of the body, only they don’t mention it because it’s the sort of thing that makes people blush!  In this last lecture Professor Kraill says the same thing you told me once.”

“Considering I’ve already told you quite a million things—­” he began in the tone one uses to a child.  She broke in passionately, turning the pages of Number Six of the Lendicott Lectures swiftly.

“Listen.  This is what he says.”

"We are loaded with sex and sex tradition, which the body and its burdens have imposed upon humanity.  Poets have written and dreamed of the delights of wine, woman and song; priests and prophets have written and thundered and dreamed of the world, the flesh and the devil.  It is only a difference of terminology.  Poet, artist, priest and anchorite alike thought all the time of the tyranny of the body until it became a million-horse-power steam hammer crushing out his microscopic pin-head of a soul.  To man, woman is still the siren tradition made her; she likes to be.  She likes to think hers is ’the face that launched a thousand ships and fired the topless towers of Ilium.’  She insists that man