She took a chocolate, nibbled it; then stepped back, laughing a little and threw out her hands. “Henry,” she cried, “what on earth am I to do with him! I've hinted. And I've begged. I'm afraid I'll hurt him—”
“You would go and get engaged to him, Sue. And I must say he plays the rôle with all his might.” After which remark, the Worm produced, scraped, filled and lighted his pipe.
“I'll start the water,” said Sue; then instead, stood gazing at the flowers. “It's so—Victorian!”
The Worm grinned cheerfully. “Peter isn't so easy to classify as that.”
“I know.” She reached for another chocolate. “He isn't Victorian.”
“Not all the time, certainly. And not all over. Just in spots.”
Her color deepened slightly. “You've never read the scenario he did for us, Henry. Nothing Victorian about that. There's a ring to it—and power. Nobody who misses the modern spirit could have written it. Not possibly. It's the real battle cry of woman's freedom. And a blow for honesty! It is when I think of that—how the pictures are to be shown in every city and every village, all over this country—reaching people that the books never reach and touching their emotions, yes, their hearts where feminist speakers and such just antagonize them—”
The sentence died out in mid-air. Sue, a flash in her deep-green eyes, stared out the window at the old red brick walls that surrounded the score of fenced-in little back yards, walls pierced with hundreds of other rear windows and burdened with cluttered fire-escapes, walls hidden here and there by high-hung lines of washing.
She spoke again. “Don't you see, Henry, that's what makes this miserable business worth while, that's what justifies it—all this posing before those camera people, working with hired actors that don't for a moment know what it's all about and don't understand my being in it or my relations with Peter or the friendly feeling I have for Zanin—it's getting so I have to fight it out with myself all over again every morning to get through it at all. But when I'm almost hopelessly stale all I have to do is come home here and shut the door and curl up on the couch and read the thing as Peter wrote it—it brings the vision back, Henry!—and then I think of him staking all his savings to make it a success—Oh, I know that's personal, just for me...”
Sue was having some trouble with sentences today. This one didn't get finished either. She stood there brooding; started another one: “Henry, Zanin couldn't do it—with all his intelligence and drive—it took Peter to phrase Zanin's own ideas and then add the real quality to them and form and human feeling—Zanin is cold, an intellectualist not an artist.” Suddenly she broke out with this—“Of course this marriage means a long series of adjustments. Do you suppose I don't know that? Doesn't every marriage?”