'It's awful,' I said, 'I think it simply wicked, the way you tear your friends to pieces!'

'But you do it yourself, you know you do! You analyse and analyse people, and then you make them up again into creatures larger than life—'

'That's exactly it,' I answered gravely. 'If I take people to pieces, I do it in order to put them together again better than they were before; I make them more real, so to speak, more significant, more essentially themselves. But to cut them up, as you do, and leave the fragments lying around anywhere on the floor—I can't tell you how cruel and heartless and wrong I think it!'