He nodded.
“Well, he—Henry, he wanted to have an affair with me.” She said this rather hurriedly and low, not at all with the familiar frankness of the Village in discussing the old forbidden topics. “He knew I was all confused, that I had got into an impasse. He made me see that I'd been talking and thinking a kind of freedom that I hadn't the courage to go in for, really—in living.”
“Courage, Sue?”
“Yes, courage—or taste—-or something! Henry, you know as well as I that the freedom we talk in the Village leads straight to—well, to complete unmorality, to—to promiscuity, to anything.”
“Perhaps,” said he, watching her and wondering with a little glow suddenly warming his heart, at her lack of guile. He thought of a phrase he had once formulated while hearing this girl talk—-“Whom among women the gods would destroy they first make honest.”
“When I was put to the test—and I was put to the test, Henry; I found that I was caught in my own philosophy, was drifting down with it—if turned out that I simply didn't believe the things I'd been saying. I even”—she faltered here, but rushed on—“I very nearly rushed into a crazy marriage with Peter. Just to save myself. Oh, I see it now! It would have been as dishonest a marriage as the French-heeledest little suburbanite ever planned.”
“You're severe with yourself,” he said.
She, lips compressed, shook her head.
“I suppose,” he mused aloud, “there's a lot of us radicals who'd be painfully put to it if we were suddenly called on to quit talking and begin really living it out. Lord, what would we do!” And mentally he added: “Damn few of us would make the honest effort to find ourselves that you're making right now.” Then, aloud: “What are you going to do?”
She dropped her eyes. “I'm going to take these ashes down cellar.”