"Don't!" he cried. "Thank God, you did whatever you've done—yes, I mean that—whatever you've done, since it enabled you to swim on." He added, "And I know it wasn't anything bad—anything unwomanly."
"I did the best I could—nothing I'm ashamed of—or proud of either. Just—what I had to do."
"But you ought to be proud that you arrived."
"No—only glad," said she. "So—so frightfully glad!"
In any event, their friendship was bound to flourish; aided by that dinner and that wine it sprang up into an intimacy, a feeling of mutual trust and of sympathy at every point. Like all women she admired strength in a man above everything else. She delighted in the thick obstinate growth of his fair hair, in the breadth of the line of his eyebrows, in the aggressive thrust of his large nose and long jawbone. She saw in the way his mouth closed evidence of a will against which opposition would dash about as dangerously as an egg against a stone wall. There was no question of his having those birthmarks of success about which he talked. She saw them—saw nothing of the less obtrusive—but not less important—marks of weakness which might have enabled an expert in the reading of faces to reach some rather depressing conclusion as to the nature and the degree of that success.
Finally, he burst out with, "Yes, I've made up my mind. I'll do it! I'm going to New York. I've been fooling away the last five years here learning a lot, but still idling—drinking—amusing myself in all kinds of ways. And about a month ago—one night, as I was rolling home toward dawn—through a driving sleet storm—do you remember a line in 'Paradise Lost'"
"I never read it," interrupted Susan.
"Well—it's where the devils have been kicked out of Heaven and are lying in agony flat on the burning lake—and Satan rises up—and marches haughtily out among them—and calls out, 'Awake! Arise! Or forever more be damned!' That's what has happened to me several times in my life. When I was a boy, idling about the farm and wasting myself, that voice came to me—'Awake! Arise! Or forever more be damned!' And I got a move on me, and insisted on going to college. Again—at college—I became a dawdler—poker—drink—dances—all the rest of it. And suddenly that voice roared in my ears, made me jump like a rabbit when a gun goes off. And last month it came again. I went to work—finished a play I've been pottering over for three years. But somehow I couldn't find the—the—whatever I needed—to make me break away. Well—you've given me that. I'll resign from the Commercial and with all I've got in the world—three hundred dollars and a trunk full of good clothes, I'll break into Broadway."
Susan had listened with bright eyes and quickened breath, as intoxicated and as convinced as was he by his eloquence. "Isn't that splendid!" she exclaimed in a low voice.
"And you?" he said meaningly.