should
I argue with you for your benefit? I don't care a damn about your side
in the matter."

"What exactly do you care about?" Michael asked. "If Lily is what you
say, I should have thought you'd be glad to be rid of her. After all,
I'm not proposing to do her any wrong."

"Oh, to the devil with your right and wrong!" Sylvia cried. "Man can
only wrong woman, when he owns her, and if this marriage is going to be
a success, you'll have to own Lily. That's what I rebel against--the
ownership of women. It makes me mad."

"Yes, it seems to," Michael put in. He was beginning to be in a rage
with Sylvia's unreasonableness. "If it comes to ownership," he went on
angrily, "I should have thought that handing her over to the highest
bidder time after time would be the real way to make her the pitiable
slave of man."

"Why?" challenged Sylvia. "You sentimental ass, can't you understand
that she treats them as I treat them, like the swine they are. She's
free. I'm free."

"You're not at all free," Michael indignantly contradicted. "You're
bound hand and foot by the lust of wealthy brutes. If you read a few
less elaborately clever books, and thought a few simpler thoughts, you'd
be a good deal happier."

"I don't want to be happier."

"Oh, I think you're merely hysterical," he said disdainfully. "But,
after all, your opinions about yourself don't matter to me. Only I
can't see what right you have to apply them to Lily; and even if you
have the right, I don't grasp your reason for wanting to."

"When I met Lily first," said Sylvia, "she had joined the chorus of a
touring company in which I was. Her mother had just died, and I'd just
run away from my husband. I thought her the most beautiful thing I'd
ever seen. That's three years ago. Is she beautiful still?"

"Of course she is," said Michael.

"Well, it's I who have kept her beautiful. I've kept her free also. If
sometimes I've let her have affairs with men, I've taken care that they
were with men who could do her no harm, for whom she had no sort of...."

"Look here," Michael burst in. "I'm sick of this conversation. You're
talking like a criminal lunatic. I tell you I'm going to marry her,
whatever you think."

"I say you won't, and you shan't," Sylvia declared.

The deadlock had been reached, and they sat there on either side of the
fire, glaring at each other.

"The extraordinary thing is," said Michael at last, "I thought you had a
sense of humor when I fir