"Now for this talk!" he said--"Love is the subject,--Love the theme! We are taught that we must love God and love our neighbor--but we don't, because we can't! In the case of God we cannot love what we don't know and don't see,--and we cannot love our neighbor because he is often a person whom we DO know and CAN see, and who is extremely offensive. Now let us consider what IS love? You, Manella, are angry because I say there is no such thing--and you accuse me of indulging in love for a woman myself. Yet--I still declare, in spite of you, there is no such thing as love! I ought to be ashamed of myself for saying this--so YOU think!--but I'm not ashamed. I know I'm right! Love is a divine idea, never realised. It is like a ninth new note in the musical scale--not to be attained. It is suggested in the highest forms of poetry and art, but the suggestion can never be carried out. What men and women call 'love' is the ordinary attraction of sex,--the same attraction that pulls all male and female living things together and makes them mate. It is very unromantic! And to a man of my mind, very useless."
She looked at him in a kind of sorrowful perplexity.
"You have much talk"--she said--"and no doubt you are clever. But I think you are all wrong!"
"You do? Wise child! Now listen to my much talk a little longer! Have you ever watched silkworms? No? They are typical examples of humanity. A silkworm, while it is a worm, feeds to repletion,--you can never get it as many mulberry leaves as it would like to eat--then when it is gorged, it builds itself a beautiful house of silk (which is taken away from it in due course) and comes out at the door in wings!--wings it hardly uses and seems not to understand--then, if it is a female moth, it looks about for 'love' from the male. If the male 'loves' it, the female produces a considerable number of eggs like pin-heads--and then?--what then? Why she promptly dies, and there's an end of her! Her sole aim and end of being was to produce eggs, which in their turn become worms and repeat the same dull routine of business. Now--think me as brutal as you like--I say a woman is very like a female silkworm,--she comes out of her beautiful silken cocoon of maidenhood with wings which she doesn't know how to use--she merely flutters about waiting to be 'loved'--and when this dream she calls 'love' comes to her, she doesn't dream any longer--she wakes--to find her life finished!--finished, Manella!--dry as a gourd with all the juice run out!"