" I don't need a damn thing," he said coldly. "You are the one who's here. You are the needy one." He laughed at her. She knew that to him she looked foolish even though that time of the Turk's execution in early girlhood had made her immune to the opinions of others. "You're here," he repeated. "So I am," she said in her cold hubris. He blew his smoke into her face. "Well, with the gender factor alone no man and woman are interested in the same things nor are they all that compatible. That's for sure." His voice drifted slowly on the stream of smoke flowing from his mouth and from the effluvia of his lackadaisical scorn. "But to make any type of relationship work -- even the most pathetic -- neither of them can just stare at the walls day-in and day-out. One has to be interested in something -- business, rearing kids, teaching, arts and crafts stuff, something. I'd say it was me, that you didn't care to live with me, and that's what made you so moody and useless in a sense; but it wouldn't explain your unwillingness to paint, would it? -- You who just sort of sit around claiming that you are an artist all hours. I guess you can sell some of that stuff -- what little you do so I guess somebody likes it. It is a shame that you don't draw more still life. Your artsiness was really beginning to have something in it." He stopped for he knew that he had run over her with maximum efficacy since gratuitous plowing through flesh and blood would not make it any more contrite. Knowing how a hurt, rejected, and emasculated ego sought to maim others in speech, wisps of air, like a diffident eunuch brandishing a butcher knife, she let him disgorge his acrimonious sound. What was it to her? It was an amusing psychological study and only this. The petty utterances he would try to use to inflict misery commensurate with a rejected proposal intrigued her. He was no more dangerous than a child running around in an Indian costume and brandishing his rubber blade. "Go on. No need to be bashful. We can't work on problems if we are ignorant of them." She meant "Go on. No need to be civil, you hateful bastard." But this would be repressed to a dream and there it would be in the flames of enactment and reenactment until the combustion was complete. He continued. "Anyhow, you just looked bored all the time toward everyone including your own son. We were your headaches; and I looked like I was wasting my time with you."