k
what life would be did each individual succeed in making himself but one
degree less strong than God himself! It may be my destiny to make
propaganda without noise; but if not, the achievement of absolute
strength in myself will move the world forward to its millennium
one-millionth part of a degree at least. For that will be the real
millennium--when there shall be no despicable weakness in the world, no
moral rottenness, when each individual shall rely upon himself alone,
independent of the environment from which the majority to-day draw
everything good and bad, their happiness or misery. Nothing will ever
purge human nature but the triumph of the higher faculties, a triumph
accomplished by an unswervingly cultivated and jealously maintained
strength."

"I don't deny that your millennium has its points, but would that not be
rather a hard world? What of love, the interdependence of the sexes, and
all the other human relations?"

"It is love and interdependence that cause all the misery of the world;
they would be the very first things I should relegate among the minor
influences, did I wield the sceptre for an hour. To women, at least, all
unhappiness comes from the superstition that love--any sort--is all. Of
course there would be marriage, but of deliberate choice, and after a
long and purely platonic friendship, in which all the horrid little
failings that do most to dissever could be recognized and weighed. Free
love and experimental matrimony are mere excuses for the sort of
sensuality that is shallow and inconstant."

"Ah! Then you would permit love to your married pair after they had
probed each other's minds and mannerisms for a year or two? That is a
concession I hardly expected."

Isabel shrugged her shoulders. "I am neither an idiot nor blind. Heaven
knows I have seen enough of reckless passion and its consequences. The
equipment of the mortal proves him to be the slave of the race, but at
least he need not remain the blind and ridiculous slave he is at
present. If I had married that man no doubt I should have loved him more
frantically than ever for a time. But that would have passed, left me
resentful of bondage, of the surrender of self. There, above all, is the
reason I shall never marry. Impersonally, I believe in marriage, or
rather accept it, but I purpose to stand apart as a complete individual,
and subtly to teach others to drag strength out of the great body of
force in which we move, until