“Lascivious! well, why not? I can’t see I do a woman any more harm by sleeping with her than by dancing with her … or even talking to her about the weather. It’s just an interchange of sensations instead of ideas, so why not?”
“Be as promiscuous as the rabbits!” said Hammond.
“Why not? What’s wrong with rabbits? Are they any worse than a neurotic, revolutionary humanity, full of nervous hate?”
“But we’re not rabbits, even so,” said Hammond.
“Precisely! I have my mind: I have certain calculations to make in certain astronomical matters that concern me almost more than life or death. Sometimes indigestion interferes with me. Hunger would interfere with me disastrously. In the same way starved sex interferes with me. What then?”
“I should have thought sexual indigestion from surfeit would have interfered with you more seriously,” said Hammond satirically.
“Not it! I don’t overeat myself, and I don’t over-fuck myself. One has a choice about eating too much. But you would absolutely starve me.”
“Not at all! You can marry.”
“How do you know I can? It may not suit the process of my mind. Marriage might … and would … stultify my mental processes. I’m not properly pivoted that way … and so must I be chained in a kennel like a monk? All rot and funk, my boy. I must live and do my calculations. I need women sometimes. I refuse to make a mountain of it, and I refuse anybody’s moral condemnation or prohibition. I’d be ashamed to see a woman walking round with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk.”
These two men had not forgiven each other about the Julia flirtation.