o let Hunt--or if you can't
bring yourself to do that--to let _me_ loan you money enough from time
to time to live on simply and comfortably for a few years, while you
study and think and write in your own free way--till you've found
yourself. My nectar simile was nonsense, just as your soda-water tap
was. You have brains and a soul, and the combination means a shining
career of some kind--even on earth. Don't fritter your genius away in
makeshift activities. Mankind needs the best we have in us; the best's
none too good. It's a duty--no, it's more than that--it's a true
_religion_ to get that expressed somehow--whether in terms of action or
thought or beauty. I know, of course, you feel this as I do, and mean to
win through to it in the end. But why handicap yourself so cruelly at
the start?"

Phil tells me that Susan, while he urged this upon her, quietly
withdrew and did not return for some little time after he had ceased to
speak. He was not even certain she had fully heard him out until she
suddenly leaned to him from her chair and gave his hand an affectionate,
grateful squeeze.

"Yes, Phil," she said, "it is a religion--it's perhaps the only religion
I shall ever have. But for that very reason I must accept it in my own
way. And I'm sure--it's part of my faith--that any coddling now will do
me more harm than good. I must meet the struggle, Phil--the hand-to-hand
fight. If the ordinary bread-and-butter conditions are too much for me,
then I'm no good and must go under. I shan't be frittering anything away
if I fail. I shan't fail--in our sense--unless we're both mistaken, and
there isn't anything real in me. That's what I must find out first--not
sheltered and in silence, but down in the scrimmage and noise of it all.
If I'm too delicate for that, then I've nothing to give this world, and
the sooner I'm crushed out of it the better! Believe me, Phil dear, I
know I'm right; I _know_."

She was pressing clenched hands almost fiercely between her girl's
breasts as she ended, as if to deny or repress any natural longing for a
special protection, a special graciousness and security, from our common
taskmaster, life.

Phil admits that he wanted to whimper like a homesick boy.

XII

Susan's informal dinner for Jimmy that evening was not really a
success. The surface of the water sparkled from time to time, but there
were grim undercurrents and icy depths. Perhaps it was not so bad as my
own impression of it, fo