"I do want to do it, Jean, very, very much. More perhaps than I can make you understand. But if it is ever written, it will be because some one believes in me."
"You have friends—and they believe."
"Do 'they'? Maybe they do. But I can't imagine Flop, or any of them, stopping long enough from their own affairs to listen to a single chapter. Besides I don't believe it's the kind of thing they would like. It's not 'strong.' I doubt it's even the 'real stuff.'"
Jean held down the unreasoning joy rising in her. Calmly and naturally Herrick was justifying her faith in him.
"Perhaps you're not quite fair. If you've never tried them you can't be sure. Sometimes I've thought that The Kitten, in some moods, was awfully tired of it, the noise and heat and—and——" Jean broke off in her clumsy effort to be perfectly just, for Herrick was looking at her in a strange, piercing way and she felt that again she was falling below the standard of honesty he had set for her. Her eyes dropped. Herrick laid both hands upon her shoulders and she could feel their cold grip on her skin.
"If the novel is ever written, Jean, it will be because some one cares for me and believes because of caring. With a woman like——"
"Don't," Jean whispered.
"It's so lonely, so damned cold and lonely and hideous," Herrick went on, as if he were not speaking to Jean at all. "We're like a lot of lost shades, each locked in the isolation of his own personality, wandering about in a fog. We never really meet or touch, but grope about blindly, never finding because there's nothing really to find."
"Don't. It's too cruel, and it can't be true. There must be something, somewhere."
"Where?"