“No, it is a matter of indifference to her, because she knows that, besides me, all of us are ready to serve her as well as everyone else, and I should serve her neither more nor less whether I were her son-in-law or not. If my marriage to her daughter results, I shall enter upon it with joy, and so I should rejoice even if she married someone else.”

“That is impossible!” exclaimed Julius. “This is a horrible thing of you⁠—that you deceive yourselves! And thus you deceive others. That stranger told me correctly about you. When I listen to you I cannot help yielding to the beauty of the life which you describe for me; but as I think it over, I see that it is all deception, leading to savagery, brutality, of life approaching that of brutes.”

“Wherein do you see this savagery?”