"I should not cross it: I should—"
"You would be miserable without your jade or your brocade and the sand would get into your hair, and you would have no bath," she said. "But every one who thinks has a Bedouin mind: it always wants me to go on and find new horizons and get nearer to blue mountains."
"The matter with you is that you want and you don't know what you want," said he.
Nadine nodded at him. Sometimes when she was with him she felt as if she was talking to a shrewd middle-aged man, sometimes to a rather affected girl. Then occasionally, and this had been in evidence to-day, she felt as if she was talking to some curious mixture of the two, who had a girl's intuition and a man's judgment. Fond as she was of the friends whom she had so easily gathered round her, gleeful as was the nonsense they talked, serious as was her study of Plato, she felt sometimes that all those sunny hours concerned but the surface of her, that, as she had said before, the individual, the character that sat behind was not really concerned in them. And Seymour, when he made mixture of his two types, had the effect of making her very conscious of the character that sat behind. He had described it just now in a sentence: it wanted it knew not what.
"And I want it so frightfully," she said. "It is a pity I don't know what it is. Because then I should probably get it. One gets what one wants if one wants enough."
"A convenient theory," he said, "and if you don't get it, you account for it by saying you didn't want it enough. I don't think it's true. In any case the converse isn't; one gets a quantity of things which one doesn't want in the least. Whereas you ought not to get, on the same theory, the things you passionately desire not to have."
Nadine finished her sugar and lit a cigarette.
"Oh, don't upset every theory," she said. "I am really rather serious about it."
He regarded her with his head on one side for a moment. "What has happened is that somebody has asked you to do something, and you have refused. You are salving your conscience by saying that he doesn't want it enough, or you would not have refused."