anionship. _C'est l'amour_, my friend!

STRANGER. You should never talk about your wife.

TEMPTER. No! For if you speak well of her, people will laugh; and if you
speak ill, all their sympathy will go out to her; and if, in the first
instance, you ask why they laugh, you get no answer.

STRANGER. No. You can never find out who you've married. Never get hold
of her--it seems she's no one. Tell me--what is woman?

TEMPTER. I don't know! Perhaps a larva or a chrysalis, out of whose
trance-like life a man one day will be created. She seems a child, but
isn't one; she is a sort of child, and yet not like one. Drags downward,
when the man pulls up. Drags upward, when the man pulls down.

STRANGER. She always wants to disagree with her husband; always has a
lot of sympathy for what he dislikes; is crudest beneath the greatest
superficial refinement; the wickedest amongst the best. And yet,
whenever I've been in love, I've always grown more sensitive to the
refinements of civilisation.

TEMPTER. You, I dare say. What about her?

STRANGER. Oh, whilst our love was growing _she_ was always developing
backwards. And getting cruder and more wicked.

TEMPTER. Can you explain that?

STRANGER. No. But once, when I was trying to find the solution to the
riddle by disagreeing with myself, I took it that she absorbed my evil
and I her good.

TEMPTER. Do you think woman's particularly false?

STRANGER. Yes and no. She seeks to hide her weakness but that only means
that she's ambitious and has a sense of shame. Only whores are honest,
and therefore cynical.

TEMPTER. Tell me some more about her that's good.

STRANGER. I once had a woman friend. She soon noticed that when I drank
I looked uglier than usual; so she begged me not to. I remember one
night we'd been talking in a cafe for many hours. When it was nearly ten
o'clock, she begged me to go home and not to drink any more. We parted,
after we'd said goodnight. A few days later I heard she'd left me only
to go to a large party, where she drank till morning. Well, I said, as
in those days I looked for all that was good in women, she meant well by
me, but had to pollute herself for business reasons.

TEMPTER. That's well thought out; and, as a view, can be defended. She
wanted to make you better than herself, higher and purer, so that she
could look up to you! But you can find an equally good explanation for
that. A wife's always angry and out of humour with her husband; an