concerned.
And so with most of the matters of ordinary life...how you make your
money, or whether you love your wife, or if you have `affairs'. All these
matters concern only the person concerned, and, like going to the privy,
have no interest for anyone else.
`The whole point about the sexual problem,' said Hammond, who was a
tall thin fellow with a wife and two children, but much more closely
connected with a typewriter, `is that there is no point to it. Strictly
there is no problem. We don't want to follow a man into the w.c., so why
should we want to follow him into bed with a woman? And therein liehe
problem. If we took no more notice of the one thing than the other, there'd
be no problem. It's all utterly senseless and pointless; a matter of
misplaced curiosity.'
`Quite, Hammond, quite! But if someone starts making love to Julia, you
begin to simmer; and if he goes on, you are soon at boiling point.'...Julia
was Hammond's wife.
`Why, exactly! So I should be if he began to urinate in a corner of my
drawing-room. There's a place for all these things.'
`You mean you wouldn't mind if he made love to Julia in some discreet
alcove?'
Charlie May was slightly satirical, for he had flirted a very little
with Julia, and Hammond had cut up very roughly.
`Of course I should mind. Sex is a private thing between me and Julia;
and of course I should mind anyone else trying to mix in.'
`As a matter of fact,' said the lean and freckled Tommy Dukes, who
looked much more Irish than May, who was pale and rather fat: `As a matter
of fact, Hammond, you have a strong property instinct, and a strong will to
self-assertion, and you want success. Since I've been in the army
definitely, I've got out of the way of the world, and now I see how
inordinately strong the craving for self-assertion and success is in men. It
is enormously overdeveloped. All our individuality has run that way. And of
course men like you think you'll get through better with a woman's backing.
That's why you're so jealous. That's what sex is to you...a vital little
dynamo between you and Julia, to bring success. If you began to be
unsuccessful you'd begin to flirt, like Charlie, who isn't successful.
Married people like you and Julia have labels on you, like travellers'
trunks. Julia is labelled Mrs Arnold B. Hammond---just like a trunk on the
railway that belongs to somebody. And you are labelled Arnold B. Hammond,
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