"You seem to be feeling very superior this evening, Fanshaw. What have you done to be so cocky?"
"Little enough, God knows.... Nan, I wish we could get Wenny settled somehow. I'm worried about him. He ought to get to work at something definite."
"But he's so enormously alive, Fanshaw. How can one worry about him. O, if I had half his vitality, sensitiveness...."
"So much of that is sheer nerves ... in a man. In you it's different. There's something rock bottom about women that men haven't at all. We are lichen. If we are too alive we burn up and shrivel.... I wonder if he isn't a little too alive."
"Nonsense."
"Do you know you do us a lot of good, Nan?"
"If you think, young man, that I'm going to be anybody's rock of ages, you are mistaken, I can tell you that."
The others were waiting for them at a corner where a drugstore sent planes of white and greenish light slanting to the gleaming mud-filmed pavement.
"This is my street, people," said Betty Thomas.
"But we'll take you to your door. Remember the holdups," said Wenny.