. But there
was small reproof in the seductive smile playing about her red lips.
With the arrogance of the youthfully virile and strong he glanced
contemptuously at the slight figure before the fireplace, old and worn
and gray, debilitated with the fierce excesses of the chase after money;
then he looked at the radiant beauty of the voluptuous young woman
beside him and laughed grimly at the painful disparity between man and
wife.

"And they say marriages are made in heaven!" To his credit be it said
that he had intended the sneer to be mental only, but somehow or other,
perhaps telepathically, the woman bent her head and a wave of crimson
suffused her face.

"Wolves know no conventions," he went on with tense vehemence. "Out
there in the wild soul calls to soul, body leaps to body in the fitness
of true affinity. It is all Life, and therefore all Love; for Life is
Love incarnated. The senile moralists of Humanity, that least fit race
of all earthly animals, preach the equality of the sexes. As applied to
human beings that is a lie. It is only out there among the wolves that
She is the equal of He in all things, his mental, physical, psychical
and sexual peer. That is why the type is kept pure and eternal. The wolf
of twenty centuries hence will be fully the equal of the wolf of to-day.
And why? Because of the virtue of perfect natural selection--the fittest
to the fittest, without the let and hindrance of sickly sentimentality,
the unnatural joining by Man-god made crimes of the unfit to the fit.
Wolves breed wolves, with full powers of the highest enjoyment of Life
and Love. Humanity begets weaklings, cowards, driveling idiots whose
highest evolution is that shapeless thing called Hope, whose greatest
virtue is submission to the anomalies of civilization. Even you, who
could be the peer of any wolf that ever ran untrammeled--"

He stopped abruptly, ashamed of his vehemence, and somewhat abashed by
the indulgent if slightly satirical smile of his amused listener.

"Even if I could run, and howl, and go hungry; every man's hand, and
what is infinitely worse, every woman's tongue against me! And what
could the Wolf give me in exchange for this?" waving her hand around the
room comprehensively and incidentally fondling her jewels.

"He could give you something in exchange for _that_," he said, with a
sinister glance towards the fireplace and again she dropped her eyes.

He drew the chess board towards him and began