“While the film job was on. Breaking training now, Jacob.”
“Well,” he mused aloud, “I made you stop for good reason enough. But now I'm not sure that you're not wise.” And he tossed his box across the table.
While she lighted the cigarette, he studied her.
None knew better than he the interesting variety of girls who came to the Village to seek freedom—some on intense feministic principles (Sue among these), others in search of the nearly mythical country called Buhemia, still others in the knowledge that there they might walk unquestioned without the cap of good repute. There were cliques and cliques in the Village; but all were in agreement regarding a freedom for woman equal to the experimental freedom of man. Love was admitted as a need. The human race was frankly a welter of animals struggling upward in the long process of evolution—struggling wonderfully. Conventional morality was hypocrisy and therefore a vice. Frankness regarding all things, an open mind toward any astonishing new theory in the psychology of the human creature, the divine right of the ego to realize itself at all costs, a fine scorn for all proverbial wisdom, something near a horror of the home, the church, and the practical business world—a blend of these was the Village, to be summed up, perhaps, in Waters Coryell's languid remark: “I find it impossible to talk with any one who was born before 1880.”
Zanin had known many women. In his own way he had loved not a few. With these he had been hard, but not dishonest. He was a materialist, an anarchist, a self-exploiter, ambitious and unrestrained, torn within by the overmastering restlessness that was at once the great gift and the curse of his blood. He wanted always something else, something more. He was strong, fertile of mind, able. He had vision and could suffer. The companionship of a woman—here and there, now and then—meant much to him; but he demanded of her that she give as he would give, without sacrifice of work or self, without obligation. Nothing but what the Village terms “the free relation” was possible for Zanin. Within his peculiar emotional range he had never wanted a woman as he had wanted Sue. He had never given himself to another woman, in energy and companionship, as he had given himself to her.
She had eluded him. She had also eluded Peter. Zanin was capable of despising young women who talked freedom but were afraid to live it. There were such; right here in the Village there were such. But he did not think Sue's case so simple as that. He spoke out now:
“Been thinking you over, Sue.”
She deposited the ash of her cigarette on a plate, glanced gravely up at him, then lowered her eyes again.
“Any result, Jacob?”
“You haven't found yourself.”