"I will teach you Italian," he said.

"I want to learn--so much!" she sighed.

"Your soul is parched," he said, in a commiserating tone. "I will water
it, I will teach you everything." His words aroused a faint, derisive
echo: Ditmar had wish to teach her, too! But now she was strongly under
the spell of the new ideas hovering like shining, gossamer spirits just
beyond her reach, that she sought to grasp and correlate. Unlike the code
which Rolfe condemned, they seemed not to be separate from life, opposed
to it, but entered even into that most important of its elements, sex. In
deference to that other code Ditmar had made her his mistress, and
because he was concerned for his position and the security of the ruling
class had sought to hide the fact.... Rolfe, with a cigarette between his
red lips, sat back in his chair, regarding with sensuous enjoyment the
evident effect of his arguments.

"But love?" she interrupted, when presently he had begun to talk again.
She strove inarticulately to express an innate feminine objection to
relationships that were made and broken at pleasure.

"Love is nothing but attraction between the sexes, the life-force working
in us. And when that attraction ceases, what is left? Bondage. The
hideous bondage of Christian marriage, in which women promise to love and
obey forever."

"But women--women are not like men. When once they give themselves they
do not so easily cease to love. They--they suffer."