"Famous ones, I mean. What's your wife like? Blonde? Brunette?" "You know a movie actress named Maureen O'Sullivan?" She nodded. "Ricky--my wife--gets mistaken for her. We go into night clubs and sometimes they give us a swell table and people begin asking each other who the hell I am--thinking they've identified Ricky." "She's sweet--Miss O'Sullivan." "Ricky is, too." "Who's the most beautiful one you ever met?" "The most beautiful one--I never met. Hedy Lamarr." "You could, though. Celebrities can meet each other." "I'm only about a Class D celebrity." "Suppose--?" She eyed me speculatively. "Suppose some glamorous dame and you met. Suppose you got a yen for her? What would you do?" "God knows." "I'm serious. After all, you've written enough articles and books and stories about it. Do you mean what you say? Or are you just trying to be sensational?" "Would I, in other words, after meeting the gorgeous Miss or Mrs. So-and-so, invite her to take a long drive in the country--or to picnic on a beach--to look at etchings? Would I, personally? I might. Sure." "What would Mrs. Wylie say?" The gray eyes were troubled--perhaps afraid. "Maybe nothing. She would never hear of it. Does marriage have to end privacy entirely--every hour of it in a life? If she did hear--she might still say nothing. She might laugh at me. She might be hurt. She might be angry. It would depend on her mood at the moment." "Her mood just at the moment!" "Sure." "Isn't that--pretty"--she sought a term--"unstable?" "Extremely stable. It would show that she regarded what we have been led to call infidelity a matter of so superficial a nature as to be colored by a superficial mood. This, in turn, would indicate that her more profound attitude toward me--and my feelings for her--was unshaken. Stable, as you would say. If, on the other hand, I knew she would have only one, single conceivable reaction--whether noncommittal or aggrieved--I could be certain that her feelings for me, and her deepest sense of my feelings, had become absolutist, rigid, probably dominating and demanding, certainly doctrinaire. I could deduce that she was in a most unstable situation--since people resort to the projection of absolutes on other people only when they are torn by uncertainty of themselves. Notice this in religions. The absolutes are defined to a hair--with different sorts of steeples, doorways, fonts and crucifixes marking infinitesimal splits over dogma--but with no commensurate variation in the effect on human conduct whatever. Is a Baptist nobler than a Methodist? Kinder? Wiser? No. So the different absolutes of both, seen detachedly, represent nothing more than the uncertainty, instability, self-doubt, inconfidence, distrust, and lack of magnanimity of both. Their passion to lay down the law, taken with the minuscule variants that ensue, is proof that Christians have no stability whatever. Sex follows the same rule--and so does everything else."