 finally - I really
don't know what he means. He says he wants the demon part of himself to be mated
- physically - not the human being. You see, he says one thing one day, and
another the next - and he always contradicts himself -«
    »And always thinks about himself, and his own dissatisfaction,« said
Hermione slowly.
    »Yes,« cried Ursula. »As if there were no one but himself concerned. That
makes it so impossible.«
    But immediately she began to retract.
    »He insists on my accepting God knows what in him,« she resumed. »He wants
me to accept him as - as an absolute - But it seems to me he doesn't want to
give anything. He doesn't want real warm intimacy - he won't have it - he
rejects it. He won't let me think, really, and he won't let me feel - he hates
feelings.«
    There was a long pause, bitter for Hermione. Ah, if only he would have made
this demand of her? Her he drove into thought, drove inexorably into knowledge -
and then execrated her for it.
    »He wants me to sink myself,« Ursula resumed, »not to have any being of my
own -«
    »Then why doesn't he marry an odalisk?« said Hermione in her mild sing-song,
»if it is that he wants.« Her long face looked sardonic and amused.
    »Yes,« said Ursula vaguely. After all, the tiresome thing was, he did not
want an odalisk, he did not want a slave. Hermione would have been his slave -
there was in her a horrible desire to prostrate herself before a man - a man who
worshipped her, however, and admitted her as the supreme thing. He did not want
an odalisk. He wanted a woman to take something from him, to give herself up so
much that she could take the last realities of him, the last facts, the last
physical facts, physical and unbearable.
    And if she did, would he acknowledge her? Would he be able to acknowledge
her through everything, or would he use her just as his instrument, use her for
his own private satisfaction, not admitting her? That was what the other men had
done. They had wanted their own show, and they would not admit her, they turned
all she was into nothingness. Just as Hermione now betrayed herself as a woman.
Hermione was like a man, she believed only in men'
