"Claire, what do you think is essential to great work?"
"I don't know. To keep at it most likely." She was digging with a little stick in the grass.
"Perhaps you're right," he agreed. "But sometimes I think it is a lot of other things; romantic wandering over the earth, a deep and lasting love, any number of such external factors."
"You don't call love external, do you?"
"I mean a permanent love," he laughed.
"Oh, well, perhaps those are necessary, certainly they would be a help to you, they would be to any one. But, after all, even a woman isn't absolutely essential to a man in order that he create great art."
"I think she is," Lawrence insisted.
"Very well, perhaps she is, but"—Claire laughed skeptically—"I know that she is not the all in all, the alpha and omega, the 'that without which nothing,' that she is so often told she is by seeking males."
"No," he agreed slowly, "in rare cases of great love that may be true, but in most cases it isn't."
"It is more likely that what you, the abstract male, really mean is that you must have some woman as wife and housekeeper."