"I'll break down," I agreed. "But I'll never write the novel! One reason is—there's no such novel. Women have always been good to me—with a few exceptions I can tolerate. Women have made love to me and they have been generous with me, and taught me, and they have been sensitive toward me. My daughter—who is sixteen—adores me. My first wife tried every combination she could think of to make me happy—and put up with me for ten years, when I was a drunkard. My second wife has gone even further. Past ten years—for one thing. And I quit drinking altogether, after we'd been married for a while. I—to repeat the most readily understandable expression—adore her. And I adore my daughter. I adore women, as a matter of fact. Such vexation as I have shown represented an aspect of that reverence: a good many women are fundamentally disappointing to anybody who cares much for women. And I resent the general damage such women do. A man"—I looked at her as loftily as I could—"has a curious faculty for resenting human sabotage even when he is not, himself, directly involved in the matter. A woman, as a rule, sees harm in the ruinous excursion of a nitwit only if she sees it as a real or potential menace to herself, loved ones, and assigns. It is a comfortingly personal outlook toward which I am hotly antipathetic."
"You talk like your books," she said.
"Why not? I wrote the damned things!"
She poured her brandy into her coffee and drank a little.
"Men," I went on, "in this century, are deeply imbued with just that personal, feminine attitude. They refuse to meddle with evils that do not immediately threaten them. They have sold out their duty toward the whole species, for local, temporal advantages. They no longer live lives but merely cadge existences. If a guy is successful and well fixed, the ordinary American does not and cannot see that he has the reason or the right—let alone the need!—to take a dim view of anything on earth." I picked up my copy of Time magazine and waved it at her. "Whenever one of my morally indignant volumes appears, this self-righteous periodical, for instance, usually begins its reviews by saying that I own a palatial residence in Florida, earn big money writing commendable hack stories for the magazines, fish all the time, and yet—blackguard!—I have the gall to gripe! The inference is that I am a lunatic. Indeed, it has become more than an inference. This carburetor of the news called my latest effort a 'whiff into midnight.' Who is nearer the witching hour—the well-heeled gent who still sees imperfections in the planet and says so or the editor who unconsciously imagines that prosperity and criticism are incongruent? That is the Ivy League philosophy—suitable to cover the ruins it soon will bring about."
"You're mad at Clare Luce," the girl said.
"There you go! Personal again! See here, ma'am. A man can get as intense feelings from statistical tables as a woman can from Sinatra's brow wave. Vital statistics give them to me. I had such sensations when, after the publication of the Smythe Report, I pensively ran over the Periodic Table. Many other charts and graphs deeply affect me. I hardly know Clare Luce. I had cocktails with her once—though. Very attractive. Very—not bright—ardent. That's the important thing in women, too. We disagreed about everything we discussed. But a woman who enters the field of ideas is obliged, naturally, to follow some man or men. Women have never left any ideas around for men or women to follow. Clare said she follows Monseigneur Fulton Sheen—another glitteringly ardent soul. I'm not mad at Clare Luce. In my situation I find it impossible to be mad at anybody on earth. And it was generally difficult for me, even before now."
"What's happened that made you change?"
"God has sent for me," I said sarcastically.
"You mean—you've been converted?"