But whatever the future of monogamous marriage, there will never
be any decay of that agreeable adventurousness which now lies at
the bottom of all transactions between the sexes. Women may
emancipate themselves, they may borrow the whole bag of
masculine tricks, and they may cure themselves of their present
desire for the vegetable security of marriage, but they will never
cease to be women, and so long as they are women they will remain
provocative to men. Their chief charm today lies precisely in the
fact that they are dangerous, that they threaten masculine liberty and
autonomy, that their sharp minds present a menace vastly greater
than that of acts of God and the public enemy--and they will be
dangerous for ever. Men fear them, and are fascinated by them.
They know how to show their teeth charmingly; the more
enlightened of them have perfected a superb technique of
fascination. It was Nietzsche who called them the recreation of the
warrior--not of the poltroon, remember, but of the warrior. A
profound saying. They have an infinite capacity for rewarding
masculine industry and enterprise with small and irresistible
flatteries; their acute understanding combines with their capacity for
evoking ideas of beauty to make them incomparable companions
when the serious business of the day is done, and the time has come
to expand comfortably in the interstellar ether.


Every man, I daresay, has his own notion of what constitutes perfect
peace and contentment, but all of those notions, despite the
fundamental conflict of the sexes, revolve around women. As for
me--and I hope I may be pardoned, at this late stage in my inquiry,
for intruding my own personality--I reject the two commonest of
them: passion, at least in its more adventurous and melodramatic