MARCUS KARENIN
our dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges through human life. You poets, you young people want to turn it to delight. Turn it to delight. That may be one way out. In a little while, if you have any brains worth thinking about, you will be satisfied, and then you will come up here to the greater things. The old religions and their new offsets want still, I see, to suppress all these things. Let them suppress. If they can suppress. In their own people. Either road will bring you here at last to the eternal search for knowledge and the great adventure of power."
"But incidentally," said Rachel Borken; "incidentally you have half of humanity, you have womankind, very much specialised for—for this love and reproduction that is so much less needed than it was."
"Both sexes are specialised for love and reproduction," said Karenin.
"But the women carry the heavier burden."
"Not in their imaginations," said Edwards.
"And surely," said Kahn, "when you speak of love as a phase—isn't it a necessary phase? Quite apart from reproduction the love of the sexes is necessary. Isn't it love, sexual love, which has released the imagination? Without that stir, without that impulse to go out from ourselves, to
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