How is it he is the brother of women? They are sisters for him because
he is neither sentimentalist nor devourer. He will not flatter to feed
on them. The one he chooses, she will know love. There are women who go
through life not knowing love. They are inanimate automatic machines,
who lay them down at last, inquiring wherefore they were caused to move.
She is not of that sad flock. She will be mated; she will have the right
to call him Matey. A certain Browny called him Matey. She lived and
died. A certain woman apes Browny's features and inherits her passion,
but has forfeited her rights. Were she, under happiest conditions,
to put her hand in his, shame would burn her. For he is just--he is
Justice; and a woman bringing him less than his due, she must be a
creature of the slime!

This was the shadowy sentiment that made the wall of division between
them. There was no other. Lord Ormont had struck to fragments that
barrier of the conventional oath and ceremonial union. He was unjust--
he was Injustice. The weak may be wedded, they cannot be married; to
Injustice. And if we have the world for the buttress of injustice, then
is Nature the flaring rebel; there is no fixed order possible. Laws are
necessary instruments of the majority; but when they grind the sane human
being to dust for their maintenance, their enthronement is the rule of
the savage's old deity, sniffing blood-sacrifice. There cannot be a
based society upon such conditions. An immolation of the naturally
constituted individual arrests the general expansion to which we step,
decivilizes more, and is more impious to the God in man, than temporary
revelries of a licence that Nature soon checks.

Arrows of thoughts resembling these shot over the half of Aminta's mind
not listening. Her lover's head was active on the same theme while he