The word was disconcerting. "Of course, I know it isn't any of my business, but still--you _are_ working too hard--you _must_ realize that. Why don't you take a holiday--a month, say--and come to England? My landlady could easily put you up." He shook his head. It was good of me, he said, but he couldn't possibly manage it. He couldn't leave his work, and besides that, there were other reasons. It would cost too much, for one thing.... And then (with a sudden agitation of voice) why _should_ he go to England? What was there in England for him? "I'm only suggesting a holiday," I said. He said that he had no time for holidays, and that if he had he wouldn't think of wasting four days of them in travelling to England and back. I let myself go when he said that. I told him that it was absurd to say that he had no time for holidays--that a man _must_ have time for holidays, unless he wants to kill himself from overwork. "And this extraordinary work of yours--which might be a sort of conjuring trick from the way you're bound to secrecy about it----" I let myself go for five minutes, and then, for less than one minute he did just the opposite of letting himself go; he spoke very slowly and quietly, weighing up each word as he uttered it. "It's no good," he said, "thinking like that. You don't understand anything about my work.... You don't understand how I've given myself to it. I must give myself to something.... I _must_--always--and that's what you don't understand." "But I _do_ understand it," I answered. "It's simply that I don't agree with it. I say that you oughtn't to give yourself like that.... It would be a good thing if you were married, for then your wife wouldn't let you." He said, for the second time: "I shall never marry." "Why not?" "Because--_really_--I don't like women. And when--if--I _do_ like them, I hate liking them.... The ones I don't dislike are the ordinary ones--like Mizzi." I said that it hadn't occurred to me that Mizzi was at all an ordinary woman. He said: "Perhaps 'ordinary' isn't the word. What I mean is that we don't--_I_ don't, at any rate--think of Mizzi as a woman exactly. She's business-like and does things--she's more like a man." I said that it hadn't occurred to me that Mizzi was in the least like a man. Really, I must have been rather irritating, but he bore it all with exemplary patience. "She's the sort of woman I can stand, anyhow," he asserted. "Then you'd better marry her," I replied jocularly, but he seemed to take it in all seriousness. "I don't want to marry at all," he repeated, "and neither does Mizzi. She doesn't bother with men. Her dream is to own a hotel, and she thinks a man would only get in her way...." XIII