And to my horror I found that I bled at every cut. The irrational sentimentalist in me sided with her, and shrieked with her pain and my own." He looked up at me, and quickly down again. He growled, "Oh, yes! I know love. It's a parasitic disease. It gets into every cell of the body, till there's nothing in one that is the undefiled 'I' anymore. However, I cured myself. I told her we were killing each other, and then I just cleared out, bleeding with love at every pore; but free."

While I was wondering what to say, he began speaking again. "Of course, I soon found I still needed a woman. In the end I cautiously linked up with another girl. I told her straight what I wanted and didn't want; just sexual companionship and no clinging. And she agreed, for she was a scientific worker herself. On this basis we had a lot of fun for a while; but now, hell, she's beginning to want too much. And part of me wants to give it, and to be given it. But once bitten, twice shy. I'm keeping a firm hand on us both, for both our sakes."

Throughout this long confession he had intermittently gobbled his escallop; and I, listening, had forgotten to eat. When his plate was empty, he looked at it with whimsical surprise and exasperation. "Damn!" he said. "It's all gone, and I missed the pleasure of it." We both laughed, and I attacked my food.

*****

Presently I asked my guest to give me a clearer view of that "real, hard, dynamic" individuality of his. What did it really want for itself. "I have told you," he said. "Power, mastery, scientific prestige, a sense of leaving my mark on human society by contributing to human knowledge." Provokingly, I said, "But how irrational! Nothing of this sort is implied in your basic physiological structure. You should be seeking merely chemical equilibrium; and for that end, you should crave merely food, air, water and bodily sexual release of tension. The rest is sheer sentimentality." He laughed. "You can't catch me out that way. Evolutionary forces have given me a conscious nature that needs more than that." I interrupted, warming to my theme. "Much more," I said, "very much more! At every stage of growth we wake to some new range of awareness, become sensitive to some new, subtler features of objective reality; and from the new ranges of objectivity, new values emerge. The child begins to wake from the sheer animal values to the values of personality, prizing the 'I' and the 'you,' and the 'we.' Little by little he discovers society, with all its tangle of conflict and community. Later he may discover humanity, the whole species, with all the values emerging from mankind's long adventure in self-realization in art and science and so on. And finally he may, or he may not, be invaded by the supreme values of, well, of the spirit."

Throughout my monologue, the young scientist had seemingly been interested less in my views than in his fruit flan. But at the word spirit he looked at me with the intentness and awkwardness of a dog facing a cat.