ou know?"

He grinned back at her. "All right," he said, "since we're not married,
I will. We'll take a case ..." He looked around the table. "We'll be
discreet," he amended, "and take a hypothetical case. We'll take Darby
and Joan. They encounter each other somewhere, and something about them
that men have written volumes about and never explained yet, sets
up--you might almost call it a chemical reaction between them--a
physical reaction, certainly. They arrest each other's attention--get to
thinking about each other, are strongly drawn together.

"It's a sex attraction--not quite the oldest and most primitive thing in
the world, but nearly. Only, Darby and Joan aren't primitive people. If
they were, the attraction would satisfy itself in a direct primitive
way. But each of them is carrying a perfectly enormous superstructure of
ideas and inhibitions, emotional refinements and capacities, and the sex
attraction is so disguised that they don't recognize it. Do you know
what a short circuit is in electricity?"

"I think so," said Rose, "but you'd better not take a chance. Tell me
that, too."

"Why," he said, "the juice that comes into your house to light it and
heat the flat-irons and the toaster, and so on, comes in by one wire and
goes out by another. Before it can get out, it's got to do all the work
you want it to do--push its way through the resistance of fine tungsten
filaments in your lamps and the iron wires in your heaters that get
white hot resisting it. When it's pushed its way through all of them and
done the work you want it to do, it's tired out and goes away by the
other wire. But if you cut off the insulation down in the basement,
where those two wires are close together, and make it possible for the
current to jump straight across without doing any work, it will take the
short circuit instead of the long one and you won't have any lights in
your house. Now do you see what I mean?

"Darby and Joan are civilized. That is to say, they're insulated. The
current's there, but it's long-circuited. The only expression it's got
is through the intelligence,--so it lights the house. Absence of common
knowledge and common interests only adds to the resistance and makes it
burn all the brighter. Naturally Darby and Joan fall victims to the very
dangerous illusion that they're intellectual companions. They think
they're having wonderful talks. All they are doing, is long-circuiting
their sex attraction. Well, ma