“Unless what?”
“Unless,” he resumed, “the fates were so miraculously thoughtful as to provide such a man with somebody whose dreams and hopes and ambitions were in mystic harmony with his own.... And that, of course, is a miracle not to be expected once in a hundred years....”
Pause.
“And it is such a confoundedly casual business too,” he went on. “Falling in love, I mean. It’s about as sudden and spontaneous and unreasonable and unthought-out as walking down a railway platform beside a train of empty carriages and selecting one compartment in preference to all the others.... And think of the horror of falling in love, not merely with somebody you don’t like, but with somebody you actively dislike. Oh, I assure you, it’s quite possible. Some wretched creature with whom fate had capriciously made you infatuated! Someone who would monopolize selfishly everything in you that was free and open to all; someone who would divert everything high and noble in you to swell that tragic outflow of wasted ambitions, warped enthusiasms, cramped souls and stunted ideals! And someone, moreover, who would make it hard for you to value the people you liked but did not love! Think of it—all your life thrown out of perspective by something as casual and involuntary as a hundred unremembered things one does every day of one’s life!”
They had entered the station-yard. It was beginning to rain in big, cold drops.
“I suppose you think intellectual attachments are all right?” she remarked.
He grunted.
“If you want to know my candid opinion,” he replied gruffly, “intellectual attachments, so called, are all bosh. If you like a clever woman (or a clever man, for that matter), the feeling is not, properly speaking, intellectual. And if you merely feel æsthetic admiration for somebody’s nimble intellect, then I should say there was no real attachment.”
“But I presume you prefer a woman should not be too intensely sexual?”
“If you mean do I prefer a woman who is half a man as well as not quite half a woman, I certainly do not. The best women, let me tell you”—(he began fishing out money from his pocket and advanced to the ticket office. Their conversation went spasmodically)—“are all sex.” (He took the tickets and rejoined her slowly, counting his change as he did so.) “Let me see, what was I saying? Oh yes, I remember.... Well, the best women, as I say, are all sex—but—but”—(interruption while the man punched their tickets at the top of the steps)—“but not always.... All sex, but not always.... That’s how it appears to me.... There’s the train just coming in. Hurry along, or we shall have to get in anywhere....”