“Think of all the _collages_, marriages, and _liaisons_ that you know, in which some frowsy or foolish or doll-like or log-like bitch accompanies the form of an otherwise sensible man: a dumbfounding, disgusting, and septic ghost! “How foul and wrong this haunting of women is!—They are everywhere!—Confusing, blurring, libelling, with their half-baked, gushing, tawdry presences! It is like a slop of children and the bawling machinery of the inside of life, always and all over our palaces. Their silly food of cheap illusion comes in between friendships, stagnates complacently around a softened mind. “I might almost take some credit to myself for at least having the grace to keep this bear-garden in the background.” Hobson had brightened up while this was proceeding.—He now said: “You might almost.—Why don’t you? I admire what you tell me. But you appear to take your German foibles too much to heart.” “Just at present I am engaged in a gala of the heart. You may have noticed that.—I am not a strict landlord with the various personalities gathered beneath my roof.—In the present case I am really blessed. But you should see the sluts that get in sometimes! They all become steadily my fiancée too.—Fiancée! Observe how one apes the forms of conventional life. It does not mean anything, so one lets it stop. Its the same with the café fools I have for friends—there’s a Greek fool, a German fool, a Russian fool,—an English fool!—There are no ‘friends’ in this life any more than there are ‘fiancées.’ So it doesn’t matter. You drift on side by side with this live stock—friends, fiancées, ‘colleagues,’ and what not.” Hobson sat staring with a bemused seriousness at the ground. “Why should I not speak plainly and cruelly of my poor, ridiculous fiancée to you or any one?—After all, it is chiefly myself I am castigating.—But you, too, must be of the party! The right to _see_ implies the right to be _seen_. As an offset for your prying, scurvy way of peeping into my affairs you must offer your own guts, such as they are⸺!” “How have I pried into your affairs?” Hobson asked with a circumspect surprise. “Any one who _stands outside_, who hides himself in a deliquescent aloofness, is a sneak and a spy⸺” “That seems to me to be a case of smut calling the kettle black. I should not have said that you were conspicuous⸺”