§ 6
They were in time to select an empty first-class compartment. There the conversation was resumed, though not precisely where it had been broken off.
“You see,” he went on, “there is a part of me that in the ordinary sense neither is nor could be in love with anybody. And that’s this ...” he touched his head. “My head is always capable of stepping in at the most awkward moments to tell me what a damn fool I am.... And I am so queerly constituted that I care more for what my head tells me than for any other advice in the world. I could not ignore its directions and still keep my own self-respect.... I said just now that providence had contrived that when a man can’t get what he wants he can be induced to want what he gets by the mere incidental process of falling in love.... That’s true enough generally, but it isn’t in my case. All my life I’ve been wanting what I can’t get. Dreams bigger than the world, ambitions beyond my own capabilities, visions higher than the stars—every idealist knows what that is. But I’m not merely an idealist. I like Debussy’s stuff, but I like Bach’s more, because Bach always knows what he’s talking about. As an economist, I dislike froth and sentiment, which always obscures truth, and that’s why I can’t stand a lot of the music that would send the average idealist into the seventh heaven. Contrariwise, as you might say, my idealism creeps into my economic work and makes me see behind all the figures and documents the lives of men and women. And that’s what a lot of economists can’t see.”
Pause.
“You see it’s not in my power to want what I can get. I shall always be reaching for the impossible.”
“Then you will never be satisfied,” she said.
“No, never,” he replied, “not even if I got what I wanted.... But you can’t understand that, can you?”
She reflected.
“I don’t know,” she answered, hesitating, “whether I understand it or not.”
And she thought passionately as she listened to him: Why can’t I understand? Why am I not like him? Why is he on a plane different from mine? Why has providence brought us together when we are so far apart?