"No. No drag! And yet I sometimes think my revolt has been a half madness. You cannot know the sheer folly, the crazy kind of tenacity that has driven me on through all these years! And for what? This mediocrity? Or is it that I am an instrument clearing the way for her? Zoe! Is there a divinity shapes our end, rough hew them how we will? Listen to something incredible. Do you know that Zoe's father doesn't know that he is a father?"
"Good God!"
"Yes, jealous truth going fiction one better."
"You mean to say you have fought this out alone?"
"He doesn't know. Neither do my parents. They would suck her down. Dwarf her with their terrible kind of love. She belongs to herself. She's a beautiful thing God has loaned me to rear into a rose, but the world is her garden in which to bloom and expand."
"In all these years they don't know your whereabouts?"
"Oh yes! I write home every Christmas. Just a line that I am well and happy. Occasionally I pick up notes of them in the St. Louis newspapers. I keep them pretty well under glass. It's all so dreamlike—I've always been obsessed with that consciousness. How faint can be the line between the dream and reality."
He drew her toward him by the hands, their faces lit, quivering, close.
"Lilly, Lilly, let us not stop just short of happiness."
"All my life I have done that."