women and talk to them. I don't see how they can love them without talking, and being friendly and intimate. How can they?"
"Well," he said, "I don't know. What's the use of my generalising? I only know my own case. I like women, but I don't desire them. I like talking to them; but talking to them, though it makes me intimate in one direction, sets me poles apart from them as far as kissing is concerned. So there you are! But don't take me as a general example, probably I'm just a special case: one of the men who like women, but don't love women, and even hate them if they force me into a pretence of love, or an entangled appearance."
"But doesn't it make you sad?"
"Why should it? Not a bit! I look at Charlie May, and the rest of the men who have affairs. . . No, I don't envy them a bit! If fate sent me a woman I wanted, well and good. Since I don't know any woman I want, and never see one . . . why, I presume I'm cold, and I really like some women very much."
"Do you like me?"
"Very much! And you see there's no question of kissing between us, is there?"
"None at all!" said Connie. "But oughtn't there to be?"
"Why, in God's name? I like Clifford, but what would you say if I went and kissed him?"
"But isn't there a difference?"
"Where does it lie, as far as we're concerned? We're all intelligent human beings, and the male and female business is in abeyance. Just in abeyance. How would you like me to start acting up like a continental male at this moment, and parading the sex thing?"
"I should hate it."
"Well then! I tell you, if I'm really a male thing at all, I never run across the female of my species. And I don't miss her, I just like women. Who's going to force me into loving, or pretending to love them, working up the sex game?"
"No, I'm not. But isn't something wrong?"
"You may feel it, I don't."
"Yes, I feel something is wrong between men and women. A woman has no glamour for a man any more."
"Has a man for a woman?"
She pondered the other side of the question.
