‘It’s quite true, you can’t live without cash,’ said May. ‘You’ve got to have a certain amount of it to be able to live and get along...even to be free to THINK you must have a certain amount of money, or your stomach stops you. But it seems to me you might leave the labels off sex. We’re free to talk to anybody; so why shouldn’t we be free to make love to any woman who inclines us that way?’

‘There speaks the lascivious Celt,’ said Clifford.

‘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 over–eat 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 around 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.

‘It’s an amusing idea, Charlie,’ said Dukes, ‘that sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them. I suppose it’s quite true. I suppose we might exchange as many sensations and emotions with women as we do ideas about the weather, and so on. Sex might be a sort of normal physical conversation between a man and a woman. You don’t talk to a woman unless you have ideas in common: that is you don’t talk with any interest. And in the same way, unless you had some emotion or sympathy in common with a woman you wouldn’t sleep with her. But if you had...’

‘If you HAVE the proper sort of emotion or sympathy with a woman, you OUGHT to sleep with her,’ said May. ‘It’s the only decent thing, to go to bed with her. Just as, when you are interested talking to someone, the Only decent thing is to have the talk out. You don’t prudishly put your tongue between your teeth and bite it. You just say out your say. And the same the other way.’