e my mother, Jack.

TANNER. [working himself up into a sociological rage] Is that any reason
why you are not to call your soul your own? Oh, I protest against this
vile abjection of youth to age! look at fashionable society as you know
it. What does it pretend to be? An exquisite dance of nymphs. What is
it? A horrible procession of wretched girls, each in the claws of a
cynical, cunning, avaricious, disillusioned, ignorantly experienced,
foul-minded old woman whom she calls mother, and whose duty it is
to corrupt her mind and sell her to the highest bidder. Why do these
unhappy slaves marry anybody, however old and vile, sooner than not
marry at all? Because marriage is their only means of escape from these
decrepit fiends who hide their selfish ambitions, their jealous hatreds
of the young rivals who have supplanted them, under the mask of maternal
duty and family affection. Such things are abominable: the voice of
nature proclaims for the daughter a father's care and for the son a
mother's. The law for father and son and mother and daughter is not
the law of love: it is the law of revolution, of emancipation, of final
supersession of the old and worn-out by the young and capable. I
tell you, the first duty of manhood and womanhood is a Declaration of
Independence: the man who pleads his father's authority is no man: the
woman who pleads her mother's authority is unfit to bear citizens to a
free people.

ANN. [watching him with quiet curiosity] I suppose you will go in
seriously for politics some day, Jack.

TANNER. [heavily let down] Eh? What? Wh--? [Collecting his scattered
wits] What has that got to do with what I have been saying?

ANN. You talk so well.

TANNER. Talk! Talk! It means nothing to you but talk. Well, go back
to your mother, and help her to poison Rhoda's imagination as she has
poisoned yours. It is the tame elephants who enjoy capturing the wild
ones.

ANN. I am getting on. Yesterday I was a boa constrictor: to-day I am an
elephant.

TANNER. Yes. So pack your trunk and begone; I have no more to say to
you.

ANN. You are so utterly unreasonable and impracticable. What can I do?

TANNER. Do! Break your chains. Go your way according to your own
conscience and not according to your mother's. Get your mind clean
and vigorous; and learn to enjoy a fast ride in a motor car instead of
seeing nothing in it but an excuse for a detestable intrigue. Come with
me to Marseilles and across to Algiers an