"But what about Monica?" Mary asked, with a little curl of irony.
"Monica?" he said. "Yes, she's my wife, I tell you. But she's not my only wife. Why should she be? She will lose nothing."
"Did she say so? Did you tell her?" Mary asked insidiously.
Slowly an anger suffused thick in his chest, and then seemed to break in a kind of explosion. And the curious tension of his desire for Mary snapped with the explosion of his anger.
"No," he said. "I didn't tell her. I had to ask you first. Monica is thick with her babies now. She won't care where I am. That's how women are. They are more creatures than men are. They're not separated out of the earth. They're like black ore. The metal's in them, but it's still part of the earth. They're all part of the matrix, women are, with their children clinging to them."
"And men are pure gold?" said Mary sarcastically.
"Yes, in streaks. Men are the pure metal, in streaks. Women never are. For my part, I don't want them to be. They are the mother-rock. They are the matrix. Leave them at that. That's why I want more than one wife."
"But why?" she asked.
He realised that, in his clumsy fashion, he had taken the wrong tack. The one thing he should never have done, he had begun to do: explain and argue. Truly, Mary put up a permanent mental resistance. But he should have attacked elsewhere. He should have made love to her. Yet, since she had so much mental resistance, he had to make his position clear.—Now he realised he was angry and tangled.
"Shall we go in?" he said abruptly.