“Jacob,” she said, “I'm drifting.”
“I heard you were trying to write.”
“Trying—yes! A girl has to appear to be doing something.”
“No plans at all, eh?”
She met this with silent assent.
Again he looked about the sprightly room; deliberately thinking. Once she glanced up at him; then waited.
“Sue,” he said, “I think I see you a little more clearly. If I'm wrong, correct me. You have an unusual amount of strength—or something. I don't know what it is. I'll fall back on the safe old word, personality. You've got plenty of intelligence. And your stage work, your dancing—you're gifted as all get-out. But you're like clockwork, you're no good unless your mainspring is working. You have to be wound up.”
For the first time in this talk Sue's green-brown eyes lighted. She leaned over the table now and spoke with a flash of feeling.
“That's it, I believe,” she said. “I've got to feel deeply—about something. I've got to have a religion.”
“Exactly, Sue. There's a fanatical strain in you. You came into the Village life fresh from college with a whole set of brand-new enthusiasms. Fanatical enthusiasms. The attitude toward life that most of us take for granted—like it, feel it, just because it is us—you came at us like a wild young Columbus. You hadn't always believed it.”