pinion is that she
means to eat you.

OCTAVIUS. [rising, pettishly] It's horrible to talk like that about her
when she is upstairs crying for her father. But I do so want her to eat
me that I can bear your brutalities because they give me hope.

TANNER. Tavy; that's the devilish side of a woman's fascination: she
makes you will your own destruction.

OCTAVIUS. But it's not destruction: it's fulfilment.

TANNER. Yes, of HER purpose; and that purpose is neither her happiness
nor yours, but Nature's. Vitality in a woman is a blind fury of
creation. She sacrifices herself to it: do you think she will hesitate
to sacrifice you?

OCTAVIUS. Why, it is just because she is self-sacrificing that she will
not sacrifice those she loves.

TANNER. That is the profoundest of mistakes, Tavy. It is the
self-sacrificing women that sacrifice others most recklessly. Because
they are unselfish, they are kind in little things. Because they have a
purpose which is not their own purpose, but that of the whole universe,
a man is nothing to them but an instrument of that purpose.

OCTAVIUS. Don't be ungenerous, Jack. They take the tenderest care of us.

TANNER. Yes, as a soldier takes care of his rifle or a musician of his
violin. But do they allow us any purpose or freedom of our own? Will
they lend us to one another? Can the strongest man escape from them when
once he is appropriated? They tremble when we are in danger, and weep
when we die; but the tears are not for us, but for a father wasted, a
son's breeding thrown away. They accuse us of treating them as a mere
means to our pleasure; but how can so feeble and transient a folly as
a man's selfish pleasure enslave a woman as the whole purpose of Nature
embodied in a woman can enslave a man?

OCTAVIUS. What matter, if the slavery makes us happy?

TANNER. No matter at all if you have no purpose of your own, and are,
like most men, a mere breadwinner. But you, Tavy, are an artist: that
is, you have a purpose as absorbing and as unscrupulous as a woman's
purpose.

OCTAVIUS. Not unscrupulous.

TANNER. Quite unscrupulous. The true artist will let his wife starve,
his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at
seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half
vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to
study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their
inmost secrets, knowing that they have the powe