2
Yet Felix could not quite understand the turn of affairs which followed the brief and dynamic intrusion of Rose-Ann’s father into their domestic life. Rose-Ann had changed. The most obvious manifestation of that change was the complete abandonment of all her social plans.
She had intended to give a number of parties to her “bourgeois friends” that spring; but they were never given; and when Felix asked why, she only shook her head and said,
“You know you don’t like parties, Felix.”
Felix was quite aware that he did not like parties. But he had definitely assessed that dislike as a species of cowardice, which he must get over. Just because he did not like parties was the very reason why he should try to learn to like them. Other people liked parties; and he wanted to become as other people are. He had surrendered himself to Rose-Ann’s guidance. He trusted her as a mentor. He had worn evening clothes, learned to carve and serve a roast of beef, talked desperately about nothing to people whose names he could not remember, because she wanted him to. He had braced himself to endure the worst that the social life had to offer; he would do whatever she demanded. And now suddenly she had ceased to demand anything! There was a tremendous relief in this relaxation; but it left him puzzled and brooding.
“I understood,” he said to her hesitatingly one day, “that you had undertaken to civilize me. Have you given up the task as hopeless?”
“But I don’t want to civilize you, Felix!” she protested.
“I thought you did want to,” he said.
“I’m sorry you thought that,” she said.
“Then what,” he insisted, “do you want me to be, if not civilized?”
“An artist,” she said.
He laughed. “That is too easy,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she asked, looking at him with incredulous wide-open eyes and parted lips.
“Rose-Ann, I’ve always been an artist. That’s the trouble with me. I don’t say I’ve been a good artist. I’ve nothing to show for my art-ing except a barrelful of youthful poems, an unfinished novel that I burned up before I came to Chicago, and a few fantastic fragments of impossible plays. But I’ve been an artist all the same, and I’ll tell you why I’m sure of it. There are two kinds of people in the world—artists and human beings. I’ve never been a human being; so I must have been an artist. And I don’t want to be any longer!”
She looked at him, frightened at this heresy.
“But Felix!” she said.
“And I thought you were going to help me,” he said.
“To stop being an artist?” she cried, starting up as though a dreadful accusation had been flung at her.
“To be a human being,” he said, laughingly.
She looked at him with eyes of alarm.
“I can’t think you mean it!” she said.
“Perhaps I don’t.... It’s hard to tell what one really does mean,” he said, discouraged. “I don’t mean that I shan’t keep on trying to write plays—if that’s what you are afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid,” she said. “Only, Felix—”
“Yes?”
“You must do what you want to do; not what you think I want you to do!”
“Why do you say that?” he asked; for it sounded cryptic, as if charged with hidden meanings.
“Because,” she said, “I think we’ve been going on a wrong basis. I’ve—done things to you I didn’t intend. I’m sorry.... And from now on I’m going to—let you alone.”
He laughed. “All right!” he said.