e'd have liked to wait
for that Marvel of Celis's, but Terry had no such desire. He was crazy
to be out of it all. It made him sick, he said, SICK; this everlasting
mother-mother-mothering. I don't think Terry had what the phrenologists
call "the lump of philoprogenitiveness" at all well developed.

"Morbid one-sided cripples," he called them, even when from his window
he could see their splendid vigor and beauty; even while Moadine, as
patient and friendly as if she had never helped Alima to hold and bind
him, sat there in the room, the picture of wisdom and serene strength.
"Sexless, epicene, undeveloped neuters!" he went on bitterly. He sounded
like Sir Almwroth Wright.

Well--it was hard. He was madly in love with Alima, really; more so than
he had ever been before, and their tempestuous courtship, quarrels, and
reconciliations had fanned the flame. And then when he sought by that
supreme conquest which seems so natural a thing to that type of man, to
force her to love him as her master--to have the sturdy athletic furious
woman rise up and master him--she and her friends--it was no wonder he
raged.

Come to think of it, I do not recall a similar case in all history or
fiction. Women have killed themselves rather than submit to outrage;
they have killed the outrager; they have escaped; or they have
submitted--sometimes seeming to get on very well with the victor
afterward. There was that adventure of "false Sextus," for instance,
who "found Lucrese combing the fleece, under the midnight lamp." He
threatened, as I remember, that if she did not submit he would slay her,
slay a slave and place him beside her and say he found him there. A poor
device, it always seemed to me. If Mr. Lucretius had asked him how he
came to be in his wife's bedroom overlooking her morals, what could he
have said? But the point is Lucrese submitted, and Alima didn't.

"She kicked me," confided the embittered prisoner--he had to talk to
someone. "I was doubled up with the pain, of course, and she jumped on
me and yelled for this old harpy [Moadine couldn't hear him] and they
had me trussed up in no time. I believe Alima could have done it alone,"
he added with reluctant admiration. "She's as strong as a horse. And
of course a man's helpless when you hit him like that. No woman with a
shade of decency--"

I had to grin at that, and even Terry did, sourly. He wasn't given to
reasoning, but it did strike him that an assault like his rather