A PRIMITIVE LOVER
Wolf led Barbara into his office, lighted the lamp, and waited in
patience for her first blinding surrender to grief to spend itself
before speaking.
He stood over her at last with a smile, bent and touched her brown
curls.
The girl sprang to her feet and faced him.
"It's no use, my beauty, I'm on to your tricks now!"
The little figure stiffened, and her gaze was steady, though her
fingers trembled as she nervously twisted the tiny handkerchief she
held.
"You've been playing me for a fool for the past two months. Your eyes
have been laughing into mine with all sorts of little daring
suggestions when you had an axe to grind at my expense. And then you
had a habit of disappearing until you needed something else. You were
off billing and cooing with our hero and smiling at my stupidity
behind my back."
"I've spoken to him to-day," Barbara answered solemnly, "the first
words of love that ever passed my lips."
"You did pretty well for an amateur, if that was the first kiss you
ever gave him."
"It was the first!" she said, defiantly.
"It will be the last for him."
"Perhaps," she answered, with a curl to her lips.
"You think I don't mean it?" Wolf demanded, stepping close and
thrusting his massive head forward while his big fists closed.
"I don't doubt it," she answered, firmly. "But I'm not afraid of you,
Herman."
"You doubt my power?" he asked.
"Over others, no."
"But over you?"
Wolf suddenly grasped her.
The girl shrank back in terror for an instant, and then, to his
surprise, her hand was still and cold and steady. Not a tremor in the
tense body. Her brown eyes, staring wide, held his gaze without a sign
of weakness or of fear. Something in her attitude startled the beast
within him. He suddenly dropped her hand and changed his tone.
"Come, let's not quarrel! Don't be foolish. It is for you I've been
scheming and planning the past year. For you the regent's palace was
planned. Within five years a hundred thousand people will be here.
The State will be rich beyond our wildest dreams, and I shall be the
State. I want you to sit by my side."
[Illustration: "WOLF GRASPED HER."]
"You say this to me after all that Catherine has been to you and your
life?"
"And why not? If I no longer love, should I be chained?"
"And this is the ideal you came here to build?" she asked, with scorn.
"Certainly. It is the essence of Socialism. In my next proclamation I
shall declare for the freedom of love. Every great Socialist has
preached this. Marriage and the family form the tap-root out of which
the whole system of capitalism grew. The system can never be destroyed
until the family is annihilated. I had thought you a woman whose
brilliant intellect had faced this issue and broken the chains of a
degrading bourgeois morality."
"The chains of love, I find, are very sweet," she interrupted, with
dreamy tenderness.
"You talk this twaddle about romantic love? You, the leader of a
revolution! Come, you are no longer a child. We are living now in the
world of freedom and reality where men and women say the unspoken
things and live to the utmost reach of their being, body and soul."
"Is it a world worth living in?" she asked.
"Was the old world of family life, of starvation and misery, worth
living in?" Wolf retorted.
"Perhaps I might have said no an hour ago, but now that my lips have
met my lover's the dream of the old family life, with its sanctity and
purity, begins to call me. And something deep down within answers with
a cry of joy. Why should you desire me, knowing that I thus love
another?"
"You can love where you like," he snapped, as his big jaws came
together. "I can get along without your love. I just want you--and I'm
going to have you!"
"I'll die first!"
"We shall see. Time works wonders."
With a shudder Barbara turned and left him.