, bending over
her, "you drive me to bay. You press me very hard. I feel myself
yielding. I am a man; and when you speak to me like that, I know
it. You enlist on your side all that is virile within me. Yet how
can I accept the terms you offer? For the very love I bear you,
how do you this injustice? If I loved you less, I might perhaps
say yes; because I love you so well, I feel compelled to say no to
you."

Herminia looked at him hard in return. Her cheeks were glowing now
with something like the shame of the woman who feels her love is
lightly rejected. "Is that final?" she asked, drawing herself up
as she sat, and facing him proudly.

"No, no, it's not final," Alan answered, feeling the woman's
influence course through body and blood to his quivering fingertips.
Magical touches stirred him. "How can it be final, Herminia, when
you look at me like that? How can it be final, when you're so
gracious, so graceful, so beautiful? Oh, my child, I am a man; don't
play too hard on those fiercest chords in my nature."

Herminia gazed at him fixedly; the dimples disappeared. Her voice
was more serious now, and had nothing in it of pleading. "It isn't
like that that I want to draw you, Alan," she answered gravely.
"It isn't those chords I want to play upon. I want to convince
your brain, your intellect, your reason. You agree with me in
principle. Why then, should you wish to draw back in practice?"

"Yes, I agree with you in principle," Alan answered. "It isn't
there that I hesitate. Even before I met you, I had arrived at
pretty much the same ideas myself, as a matter of abstract
reasoning. I saw that the one way of freedom for the woman is to
cast off, root and branch, the evil growth of man's supremacy. I
saw that the honorableness of marriage, the disgrace of free union,
were just so many ignoble masculine devices to keep up man's
lordship; vile results of his determination to taboo to himself
beforehand and monopolize for life some particular woman. I know
all that; I acknowledge all that. I see as plainly as you do that
sooner or later there must come a revolution. But, Herminia, the
women who devote themselves to carrying out that revolution, will
take their souls in their hands, and will march in line to the
freeing of their sex through shame and calumny and hardships
innumerable. I shrink from letting you, the woman that I love,
bring that fate upon yourself; I shrink still more from being