'You would not?'
'Most certainly I should not. Why suggest it? Kato is your friend as much as mine. Are all women's friendships so unstable?'
'Be careful, Julian: you are on the quicksands.'
'I have had enough of these topics,' he said, 'will you leave them?'
'No; I choose my own topics; you shan't dictate to me.'
'You would sacrifice Miloradovitch without a thought, to please me—why should it please me?—but you would not forgo the indulgence of your jealousy! I am not grateful. Our senseless quarrels,' he said, 'over which we squander so much anger and emotion.' But he did not stop to question what lay behind their important futility. He passed his hand wearily over his hair, 'I am deluded sometimes into believing in their reality and sanity. You are too difficult. You ... you distort and bewitch, until one expects to wake up from a dream. Sometimes I think of you as a woman quite apart from other women, but at other times I think you live merely by and upon fictitious emotion and excitement. Must your outlook be always so narrowly personal? Kato, thank Heaven, is very different. I shall take care to choose my friends amongst men, or amongst women like Kato,' he continued, his exasperation rising.
'Julian, don't be so angry: it isn't my fault that I hate politics.'
He grew still angrier at her illogical short-cut to the reproach which lay, indeed, unexpressed at the back of his mind.
'I never mentioned politics. I know better. No man in his senses would expect politics from any woman so demoralisingly feminine as yourself. Besides, that isn't your rôle. Your rôle is to be soft, idle; a toy; a siren; the negation of enterprise. Work and woman—the terms contradict one another. The woman who works, or who tolerates work, is only half a woman. The most you can hope for,' he said with scorn, 'is to inspire—and even that you do unconsciously, and very often quite against your will. You sap our energy; you sap and you destroy.'
She had not often heard him speak with so much bitterness, but she did not know that his opinions in this more crystallised form dated from that slight moment in which he had divined her own untrustworthiness.