“I don’t admit it. There is no common currency in thoughts or ideas. To me parallel lines are antagonistic lines. Why should you want to act?”
“I want to express myself as strongly as you do. I want to succeed.”
“I don’t like women who succeed. Why should you succeed? Where’s the necessity—?”
“Born in me,” she answered.
His words for the moment had hurt her bitterly, but the subtler side of her nature took comfort from the almost childishly petulant tone in which he had spoken them.
“The necessity is born by the things around you,” he said. “They are the impulses toward success.”
“Yes, that’s true. Perhaps it was the wretched drabness of my surroundings which fired the impulse in me. We haven’t talked to each other of our people, you and I?”
“I never think back,” he said.
“I do, because it’s the impetus to think forward.”
He looked at her critically.