At the Tombs that day, I tried, and to a large extent succeeded, in forgetting the problem. But back in the Teepee, at dinner with Norman, it seized me again. Even Guiseppe noticed my preoccupation and walked about on tiptoe. "What’s eating you?" Norman asked as we drank our coffee. "Any way I can lend a hand?" "A woman," I said. "That lets me out." And after a while he muttered "Hell." "What do you think," I asked—suddenly resolved to get an outside opinion—"about one’s right to be intimate with a woman, outside of marriage?" "I don’t think about it at all," he snapped. "Not nowadays. Time was when I didn’t think of much else. It didn’t do me any good. The times are rotten—out of joint. Everything we do is out of joint—inevitably. Ninety per cent of us want to do what’s right and as it is ninety-nine per cent of us ball things up. I don’t think much of marriage. I tried it once—divorced." This was news to me. "I don’t like to talk about it. No use now. It was a miserable affair. I tried to be decent—did all I knew how to make it right. But I guess the girl suffered more than I did—which is one of the reasons why I hate God. Some people tumble into happiness—but it seems luck to me—pure luck." I cannot recall that evening’s talk in detail. Norman was unusually reticent. It was only by questions that I could draw him out. "What do you think about free love?" I asked. "It’s a contradiction in terms. There’s nothing free about love. It’s tying oneself up in the tightest kind of a knot. A man will not only work his fingers off for the woman he loves—he’ll have his hair cut the way she likes. A person in love doesn’t want to be free. The hell of it is when the slavery continues after the love is dead. Don’t try to free love—what’s needed is the emancipation of the loveless." We were silent for a while, very much distressed that we could find no solid anchorage. I was about to ask some other question when he broke out again on his own line of thought. "Abolishing marriage won’t do it. These Anarchists are naïve. They want to make things simple—say free love would simplify the matter. But all progress—all evolution—is towards more complex forms. Our brains are better than monkey brains because they’re more complex. This "simple life" talk is rank reaction. I don’t want to see laws abolished, but brought up to date. Civilization means ever increasing complexity in the forms of life. And we try to govern it by Roman law, plus a hodge podge of mediæval common law. Not less laws—but modern laws." For a while his mind played about this idea, then he ended the discussion abruptly. "Why put your problem up to me? As far as solving the man and woman question goes, my life has been a miserable failure. No matter what you do, whether you quit or go ahead—unless you’re lucky as hell—you’ll wish you were a eunuch before you’re through."