"I'm only suggesting a holiday," I said.
He said that he had no time for holidays, and that if he had he wouldn't think of wasting four days of them in travelling to England and back.
I let myself go when he said that. I told him that it was absurd to say that he had no time for holidays—that a man must have time for holidays, unless he wants to kill himself from overwork. "And this extraordinary work of yours—which might be a sort of conjuring trick from the way you're bound to secrecy about it——"
I let myself go for five minutes, and then, for less than one minute he did just the opposite of letting himself go; he spoke very slowly and quietly, weighing up each word as he uttered it. "It's no good," he said, "thinking like that. You don't understand anything about my work.... You don't understand how I've given myself to it. I must give myself to something.... I must—always—and that's what you don't understand."
"But I do understand it," I answered. "It's simply that I don't agree with it. I say that you oughtn't to give yourself like that.... It would be a good thing if you were married, for then your wife wouldn't let you."
He said, for the second time: "I shall never marry."
"Why not?"
"Because—really—I don't like women. And when—if—I do like them, I hate liking them.... The ones I don't dislike are the ordinary ones—like Mizzi."
I said that it hadn't occurred to me that Mizzi was at all an ordinary woman.
He said: "Perhaps 'ordinary' isn't the word. What I mean is that we don't—I don't, at any rate—think of Mizzi as a woman exactly. She's business-like and does things—she's more like a man."