She agreed, but said that the best were almost as difficult as the worst when it came to board and breakfast with them.
“Aren’t you human?” asked Bertram, half jestingly, half in earnest. “Don’t you need love, and the passion of life?”
She talked so frankly to him that he could speak like that.
That doubt about her humanity amused her exceedingly.
“Man!” she cried, “I’m a living Cleopatra without her Antony! If I were to ease up an instant on blinded men, political meetings, ‘Left Wing’ committees, audacious novels, and all manner of work, goodness knows what I should do in the way of amorous adventure. I go in for what the psychoanalysts call the sublimation of sex.”
“What the deuce is that?” asked Bertram.
“Transferring the emotion to intellectual aims. Producing books instead of babies. Reforming society instead of yearning for a kiss. Keeping busy on foolish, futile things, instead of wasting one’s energy in amorous dalliance. That’s my advice to you, young fellow! Cut out the emotional stuff for a time. Forget Joyce and marriage, and all this morbid love-agony. Life’s bigger than that. It’s only a little messy side of life. We make too much fuss about it, exaggerate the importance of the damn thing by always thinking and writing and talking about it. Go and make a revolution somewhere, or lead an expedition to find the living Megatherium, or write a book to ‘bust’ the falsity of things, or cut down trees in Canada, or convert cannibals to Christianity, or Christians to a decent code of honour, or make some plan for a higher civilisation, or some plan for destroying the civilisation we have—any good, straight, clean, manly job that’s not mixed up with the eternal soppy and sickly question of love and Louisa. Give it a miss, O Knight of the Rueful Countenance.”
Bertram shook his head.
“Human nature is human nature. It doesn’t give one any peace that way. It keeps on nagging.”
“Don’t let it nag. Crush the little devil down. Say, ‘Avaunt, you vampire!’ Look at me! A Cleopatra, yet beyond reproach, as Cæsar’s wife!”