“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.”

“But women—­women are not like men.  When once they give themselves they do not so easily cease to love.  They—­they suffer.”

He did not seem to observe the bitterness in her voice.

“Ah, that is sentiment,” he declared, “something that will not trouble women when they have work to do, inspiring work.  It takes time to change our ideas, to learn to see things as they are.”  He leaned forward eagerly.  “But you will learn, you are like some of those rare women in history who have had the courage to cast off traditions.  You were not made to be a drudge....”

But now her own words, not his, were ringing in her head—­women do not so easily cease to love, they suffer.  In spite of the new creed she had so eagerly and fiercely embraced, in which she had sought deliverance and retribution, did she still love Ditmar, and suffer because of him?  She repudiated the suggestion, yet it persisted as she glanced at Rolfe’s red lips and compared him with Ditmar.  Love!  Rolfe might call it what he would—­the life-force, attraction between the sexes, but it was proving stronger than causes and beliefs.  He