“You know,” he started, “when you consider the thousands of millions that inhabit the world you must realize that the chance of anybody meeting the one person most ideally suited to him is so mathematically small as to be not worth considering.... We all have to put up with either nothing at all or the thousandth or the millionth best.... Somewhere in the world there is, no doubt, somebody who would fit in with me so exquisitely that every phase of my life and endeavour would be the better for the fusing of two into one.... Same with you.... But what earthly chance is there of either of us ever discovering that person? Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack! It’s worse than that: you do know the needle when you have found it, but if a man were to meet his ideal partner, the chances are he wouldn’t recognize her! ... I tell you, the quest of an ideal mate is hopeless from the start. If you’re extraordinarily lucky, you may get somebody not many thousand places down on the list that is headed by that theoretical ideality who lives in the next street or the next continent....”
“And what if you’re not extraordinarily lucky?” she put in.
“Providence, or whatever you choose to call it,” he replied, “has realized that the vast majority of people cannot in the nature of things be extraordinarily lucky. But providence has wisely contrived that if a man is unable to get the woman he wants, there is at least one method by which he can be made to want the woman he gets.”
“And what is the method?”
“Very simple.... Falling in love with her.”
“I suppose you don’t agree with falling in love?”
He laughed.
“You might as well ask me if I agreed with eating and drinking. Certainly a good deal of time and labour would be saved if we didn’t have to perform these functions.... What I object to in falling in love (and it’s a purely personal objection: I mean it applies to me and not necessarily to anybody else) is simply that it’s such a monopolizer of energy.... I’m one of those people who’re used to doing many things at once. There are heaps of important things in my life that love has never had anything to do with and never could have ... and yet love, if it were violent enough, and if I were weak enough, might completely paralyse them for a time” ... He began searching for a simile—“like,” he added, “like a perfectly loyal and orderly body of workpeople compelled to take a rest because of a strike hundreds of miles away that has really no connection with them at all....”
She nodded.
“There is, or ought to be, in every man and woman some divine sense of purposefulness, some subtle foretaste of greater things that would make life worth living if everything else were taken away. And it ought to be completely independent of and separate from every other living creature in the world. Call it personality, or ‘ego,’ or anything you like. It is above jealousy and envy. It gives every man a sunken indestructible pride in being himself and no one else. That’s where novelists, sentimental folk and such like make their mistake. They give love far too prominent a place in the scheme of things.... Love is only one phase of life. At critical moments no doubt it does take precedence of everything else, but think of the heaps of other things that go to make up life! Ambition, for instance. And ideals.... A man may have ideals so utterly removed from all connection with love that if they were blurred by any act of his, love would be a worthless recompense.... Oh yes, falling in love may be a passably pleasant means of frittering away a dull seaside holiday, but for a busy ambitious spirit it spells—usually—ruination—unless—unless—”