The morning after the Frenchwoman’s visit, as we walked, he took up his railing against ‘self-obsessed people’. His particular bugbear is people who never ask him questions. I asked him whether he’d always found himself surrounded by such people, or if it was a recent development. ‘Oh, there’ve always been some, but there are more lately. And when I went to live in Melbourne and met your family, I really started to become aware of it.’ I said, working at not being ‘emphatic’, that I’d had a bit of an idea about this problem. I said I’d noticed that when he met someone new he would soon begin to ask them quite intimate questions. They, surprised, would reply; and then he, rather than offering corresponding information about himself and his own life, as most people do in the give-and-take of conversation, would push on with further questions (always intelligent and sensitive) into the other person’s territory. In this way the other was drawn into revealing himself, while V remained veiled, and thus, in the end, more powerful. This made him furious. He said I’d ‘shifted the blame’ on to him. I said I didn’t think I was blaming anyone. I said I was trying to examine the dynamic of the phenomenon that bothered him so much. He battered away, declaring that men’s way of conversing is ‘better and wiser’ than women’s, because it doesn’t ‘depend on subjective anecdote’.