After the engagement, the quarrel. It lasted all the way up the schoolhouse lane.
"I do care for you, I do, really."
"You don't know what you're talking about. You may care for me as a child cares. You don't care as a woman does. No woman who cared for a man would write the letters you do. I ask you to tell me about yourself—what you're feeling and thinking—and you send me some ghastly screed about Spinoza or Kant. Do you suppose any man wants to hear what his sweetheart thinks about Space and Time and the Ding-an-sich?"
"You used to like it."
"I don't like it now. No woman would wear those horrible clothes if she cared for a man and wanted him to care for her. She wouldn't cut her hair off."
"How was I to know you'd mind so awfully? And how do you know what women do or don't do?"
"Has it never occurred to you that I might know more women than you know men? That I might have women friends?"
"I don't think I've thought about it very much."
"Haven't you? Men don't live to be thirty-seven without getting to know women; they can't go about the world without meeting them…. There's a little girl down in Sussex. A dear little girl. She's everything a man wants a woman to be."
"Lots of hair?"