"But what's the use?"—with a gesture of impatience and a set of the mouth that was far from pleasant. "You're doomed to fail and even if you should hit on the one chance in a thousand of pulling through, what would you get? Less than I can give you in the time it takes to sign my name. You won't let me talk love and you don't seem to have much hope that you ever will find the love you think you want, so let's put love aside once more. Come with me, Jane. I'll give you all you could ever hope to get here and without the cost of the awful effort anything like success would require.
"You've been bored, perhaps, and discouraged. You've taken this thing as a ... a last straw. Won't you listen to reason?"
"The last straw," she repeated. "Yes, I guess that is it. Dick, do you know how close I came to letting you do the thing you want to do?" She put the question sharply. "I'll tell you: Within three hundred dollars! That's how close.
"Oh, you don't know the game I've played. No one knows it. You all have just seen the exterior, the show. You've never been behind the scenes with me.
"I never knew my mother. I never knew my father well. I don't know that he cared much for me after she went; perhaps, though, he was only afraid to bring up a girl alone. First, it was boarding school, then finishing school, then a woman companion of the smart sort. Then he died, and we discovered that his fortune was not what it had been, that it was a miserable thing for a girl to depend on who had been trained as I had been trained.
"You met me soon after I was alone. I fell in with your crowd and they picked me up. I didn't like them particularly and certainly I didn't like their life, but it was the only one open for me. We lived hard, heartless lives, made up of week-ends and dances and cocktails and greed!
"Materialism is the right charge! I was steeped in it; all those girls were. It was the only thing any of us lived for. Girls sold themselves for material advantage; they loathed it, most of them, but they lied to themselves and tried to make the rest of us believe it was happiness. They knew, and we knew what it was and we knew, too, that they were helpless to do otherwise.
"Then you came and made love to me on the same crass basis. I liked you, Dick. I didn't love you. I cared no more for you than I did for three or four men so I kept putting you off, never actually discouraging you to a point where you would give up. I was simply closing my eyes to the inevitable.
"Now and then we met women, to us strange creatures, who did things. I never can make anyone understand how inferior I felt beside them. Why, I remember one little decorator who, because she was young and cheap, came to do my apartment over. I had her stay for dinner and she was quite overwhelmed with many things.
"When she went away I cried from sheer envy ... and she was going down somewhere into Greenwich Village to sleep in a stuffy little studio. But she was doing something. I used to feel guilty before my dressmaker and even my maid. I didn't understand why that was, then; it was not a sensation produced by reason; by intuition, rather.