riage certificate was her
license! She gave you a wanton's love, and you gave her just what you
got! And I made her understand that! I made her understand it right here
in this place! That's why I wanted to come here--I could see only her
picture, and I wanted to see a _real_ one of them! Until to-night, I
could never see either of you, but I always knew where you were!

"And when you brought her here, I made her look at that enemy of me and
my kind that I could always _feel_--those women that she was one of and
that she _knew_ she was one of when I screamed it at her in this place!
For _I was with you two that night! I was with you till after you'd gone
home, you demons!_ That's why she'd never come near the place again, the
coward, the miserable coward! That's why I hate her worse than I hate
you! There's a pitiful little excuse for the men, because they're
_stupider_.

"For the hideous doom of all our hopeless millions, the women are more
wickedly to blame, because they must face the fact that we are waiting
to get in. God, God, I'd gladly be even a woman, if I could! But you're
bad enough--bad enough--bad enough to deserve the fate you face
to-night! And now, God help you, you're facing it, just as I said you
would! You deserve it because you were put here with a purpose and you
flatly wouldn't fulfil it! God only demands that mankind should be made
in His image. In a wisdom that you have no right to question. He lets
the images go their own way, as you've gone yours. Yet you, and all
others like you, the simple, humble image-workers, instead of rejoicing
that you have work to do, set your little selves up far greater than
Great God, and actually decide whether men shall even _be_!

"You have a lot of hypercritical, self-justifying theories about
it--that it's better for them not to live at all than to suffer some of
the things that life, even birth itself, can wither them with. But there
never yet was any living creature, no matter how smeared and smitten,
that told the truth when he said he wished he'd never been born, while
we, the countless millions of the lost, pound and shriek for
life--forever shriek and hope! That's the worst anguish of the
lost--they hope! I've shown what can be done through that anguish, as
it's never been shown before. Even the terrible night that woman died, I
hoped! I hoped more than ever, for knowing then that for all eternity it
was too late, I hoped for _revenge_! And revenge was m