"And you talk so coldly about sex," she said. "You talk as if you had only wanted your own pleasure and satisfaction."
She was protesting nervously against him.
"Nay!" he said. "I wanted to have my pleasure and satisfaction of a woman, and I never got it: because I could never get my pleasure and satisfaction of her unless she got hers of me at the same time. And it never happened. It takes two."
"But you never believed in your women. You don't even believe really in me," she said.
"I don't know what believing in a woman means."
"That's it, you see!"
She still was curled on his lap. But his spirit was grey and absent, he was not there for her. And everything she said drove him further.
"But what do you believe in?" she insisted.
"I don't know."
"Nothing, like all the men I've ever known," she said.
They were both silent. Then he roused himself and said:
"Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warm-hearted, I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy."
"But you don't fuck me cold-heartedly," she protested.
"I don't want to fuck you at all. My heart's as cold as cold potatoes just now."
"Oh!" she said, kissing him mockingly. "Let's have them sautées." He laughed, and sat erect.
"It's a fact!" he said. "Any thing for a bit of warm-heartedness. But the women don't like it. Even you don't really like it. You like good, sharp, piercing cold-hearted fucking, and then pretending it's all sugar. Where's your tenderness for me? You're as suspicious of me as a cat is of a dog. I tell you it takes two even to be tender and warm-hearted. You love fucking all right: but you want it to be called something grand and mysterious, just to flatter your own self-importance. Your own self-importance is more to you, fifty times more, than any man, or being together with a man."
"But that's what I'd say of you. Your own self-importance is everything to you."
"Ay! Very well then!" he said, moving as if he wanted to rise.
