And so with most of the matters of ordinary life...how you make your money, or whether you love your wife, or if you have ‘affairs’. All these matters concern only the person concerned, and, like going to the privy, have no interest for anyone else.

‘The whole point about the sexual problem,’ said Hammond, who was a tall thin fellow with a wife and two children, but much more closely connected with a typewriter, ‘is that there is no point to it. Strictly there is no problem. We don’t want to follow a man into the w.c., so why should we want to follow him into bed with a woman? And therein liehe problem. If we took no more notice of the one thing than the other, there’d be no problem. It’s all utterly senseless and pointless; a matter of misplaced curiosity.’

‘Quite, Hammond, quite! But if someone starts making love to Julia, you begin to simmer; and if he goes on, you are soon at boiling point.’...Julia was Hammond’s wife.

‘Why, exactly! So I should be if he began to urinate in a corner of my drawing–room. There’s a place for all these things.’

‘You mean you wouldn’t mind if he made love to Julia in some discreet alcove?’

Charlie May was slightly satirical, for he had flirted a very little with Julia, and Hammond had cut up very roughly.

‘Of course I should mind. Sex is a private thing between me and Julia; and of course I should mind anyone else trying to mix in.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ said the lean and freckled Tommy Dukes, who looked much more Irish than May, who was pale and rather fat: ‘As a matter of fact, Hammond, you have a strong property instinct, and a strong will to self–assertion, and you want success. Since I’ve been in the army definitely, I’ve got out of the way of the world, and now I see how inordinately strong the craving for self–assertion and success is in men. It is enormously overdeveloped. All our individuality has run that way. And of course men like you think you’ll get through better with a woman’s backing. That’s why you’re so jealous. That’s what sex is to you...a vital little dynamo between you and Julia, to bring success. If you began to be unsuccessful you’d begin to flirt, like Charlie, who isn’t successful. Married people like you and Julia have labels on you, like travellers’ trunks. Julia is labelled MRS ARNOLD B. HAMMOND—just like a trunk on the railway that belongs to somebody. And you are labelled ARNOLD B. HAMMOND, CO MRS ARNOLD B. HAMMOND. Oh, you’re quite right, you’re quite right! The life of the mind needs a comfortable house and decent cooking. You’re quite right. It even needs posterity. But it all hinges on the instinct for success. That is the pivot on which all things turn.’

Hammond looked rather piqued. He was rather proud of the integrity of his mind, and of his NOT being a time–server. None the less, he did want success.