"People like you and Queen don't want to bother about age. Neither of you has any age. And I'm not imploring you to have her. I'm only telling you that she's there for you if you want her. But doesn't she attract you? Isn't she positively irresistible?" She added with poignancy: "I know if I were a man I should find her irresistible."
"Just so."
A look of sacrifice came into Concepcion's eyes as she finished:
"I'd do anything, anything, to make Queen happy."
"Yes, you would," retorted G.J. icily, carried away by a ruthless and inexorable impulse. "You'd do anything to make her happy even for three months. Yes, to make her happy for three weeks you'd be ready to ruin my whole life. I know you and Queen." And the mild image of Christine formed in his mind, soothingly, infinitely desirable. What balm, after the nerve-racking contact of these incalculable creatures!
Concepcion retired with a gesture of the arm and sat down by the fire.
"You're terrible, G.J.," she said wistfully. "Queen wouldn't be thrown away on you, but you'd be thrown away on her. I admit it. I didn't think you had it in you. I never saw a man develop as you have. Marriage isn't for you. You ought to roam in the primeval forest, and take and kill."
"Not a bit," said G.J., appeased once more. "Not a bit.... But the new relations of the sexes aren't in my line."
"New? My poor boy, are you so ingenuous after all? There's nothing very new in the relations of the sexes that I know of. They're much what they were in the Garden of Eden."