“If you want to know my candid opinion,” he replied gruffly, “intellectual attachments, so called, are all bosh. If you like a clever woman (or a clever man, for that matter), the feeling is not, properly speaking, intellectual. And if you merely feel æsthetic admiration for somebody’s nimble intellect, then I should say there was no real attachment.” “But I presume you prefer a woman should not be too intensely sexual?” “If you mean do I prefer a woman who is half a man as well as not quite half a woman, I certainly do not. The best women, let me tell you”--(he began fishing out money from his pocket and advanced to the ticket office. Their conversation went spasmodically)--“are all sex.” (He took the tickets and rejoined her slowly, counting his change as he did so.) “Let me see, what was I saying? Oh yes, I remember.... Well, the best women, as I say, are all sex--but--but”--(interruption while the man punched their tickets at the top of the steps)--“but not always.... All sex, but not always.... That’s how it appears to me.... There’s the train just coming in. Hurry along, or we shall have to get in anywhere....” § 6 They were in time to select an empty first-class compartment. There the conversation was resumed, though not precisely where it had been broken off. “You see,” he went on, “there is a part of me that in the ordinary sense neither is nor could be in love with anybody. And that’s this ...” he touched his head. “My head is always capable of stepping in at the most awkward moments to tell me what a damn fool I am.... And I am so queerly constituted that I care more for what my head tells me than for any other advice in the world. I could not ignore its directions and still keep my own self-respect.... I said just now that providence had contrived that when a man can’t get what he wants he can be induced to want what he gets by the mere incidental process of falling in love.... That’s true enough generally, but it isn’t in my case. All my life I’ve been wanting what I can’t get. Dreams bigger than the world, ambitions beyond my own capabilities, visions higher than the stars--every idealist knows what that is. But I’m not merely an idealist. I like Debussy’s stuff, but I like Bach’s more, because Bach always knows what he’s talking about. As an economist, I dislike froth and sentiment, which always obscures truth, and that’s why I can’t stand a lot of the music that would send the average idealist into the seventh heaven. Contrariwise, as you might say, my idealism creeps into my economic work and makes me see behind all the figures and documents the lives of men and women. And that’s what a lot of economists can’t see.” Pause. “You see it’s not in my power to want what I can get. I shall always be reaching for the impossible.” “Then you will never be satisfied,” she said. “No, never,” he replied, “not even if I got what I wanted.... But you can’t understand that, can you?” She reflected.