"I think you will, because—I don't believe you're ever afraid, are you?"
"No—I don't believe I am. You see," he seemed to be feeling his way carefully through this new experience of dissecting his own impulses, "there is really nothing to be afraid of in the world. Of course there is sickness, but when you're well you don't go about fearing a possible illness; there's hard work, but that's fun."
"There's poverty."
"Yes, I know there is, but, somehow, the poorer I am the freer I feel."
"But it's so ugly—always skimping and twisting and thinking about money. It—it's stifling."
"But you don't stay in a state of poverty for long," Roger laughed. "You get busy getting out of it. But while it lasts there's something exhilarating in being broke and not knowing what's going to happen. You know how it feels on a clear, cold, sunny morning of north wind, when the bay's all white-caps and you can almost see the windows of every house in Oakland? The air seems more alive than at any other time, and everybody goes round with his head up, smiling. Of course the feeling wouldn't last forever, but, for a time—it's like being suddenly freed from all binding restrictions, being lifted from a groove and thrown suddenly out into new possibilities—like being picked up by this wind and carried—off to China. There's something safe—and depressing—about a steady income."
Anne tried to smile in return. But the tissue-wrapped allotments of her childhood were too vivid.
"I don't think it's the having nothing that exhilarated you, it's the excitement of getting the next thing."
Roger stopped and the wind wrapped them about. "I never thought of it that way," he said slowly, "but perhaps it was."
They went on again in a moment, their relation somehow readjusted. Roger felt masculine and dense; Anne protective and feminine. Roger felt her sensitive and intuitive reaction to hidden impulses, and she his need to be looked after.