And yet our Herminia was a woman after all. Some three years
later, when Harvey Kynaston came to visit her one day, and told her
he was really going to be married,--what sudden thrill was this
that passed through and through her. Her heart stood still. She
was aware that she regretted the comparative loss of a very near
and dear acquaintance.
She knew she was quite wrong. It was the leaven of slavery. But
these monopolist instincts, which have wrought more harm in the
world we live in than fire or sword or pestilence or tempest,
hardly die at all as yet in a few good men, and die, fighting hard
for life, even in the noblest women.
She reasoned with herself against so hateful a feeling. Though she
knew the truth, she found it hard to follow. No man indeed is
truly civilized till he can say in all sincerity to every woman of
all the women he loves, to every woman of all the women who love
him, "Give me what you can of your love and of yourself; but never
strive for my sake to deny any love, to strangle any impulse that
pants for breath within you. Give me what you can, while you can,
without grudging, but the moment you feel you love me no more,
don't pollute your own body by yielding it up to a man you have
ceased to desire; don't do injustice to your own prospective
children by giving them a father whom you no longer respect, or
admire, or yearn for. Guard your chastity well. Be mine as much
as you will, as long as you will, to such extent as you will, but
before all things be your own; embrace and follow every instinct of
pure love that nature, our mother, has imparted within you." No
woman, in turn, is truly civilized till she can say to every man of
all the men she loves, of all the men who love her, "Give me what
you can of your love, and of yourself; but don't think I am so
vile, and so selfish, and so poor as to desire to monopolize you.
Respect me enough never to give me your body without giving me your
heart; never to make me the mother of children whom you desire not
and love not." When men and women can say that alike, the world
will be civilized. Until they can say it truly, the world will be
as now a jarring battlefield for the monopolist instincts.
Those jealous and odious instincts have been the bane of humanity.
They have given us the stiletto, the Morgue, the bowie-knife. Our
race must inevitably in the end outlive them. The test of man's
plane in the scale of being is how far he has outlived them. They
are surviving relics of the ape and tiger. But we must let the ape
and tiger die. We must cease to be Calibans. We must begin to be
human.