“Almost exactly.”
“The Truffler, according to Pete, builds no home, rears no young, produces nothing. She goes in for self-expression instead of self-abnegation. She is out for herself, hunting the truffles, the delicate bits, playing with love and with life. That's about it?”
“Just about, Henry.”
“Well, in applying it only to women, Pete was arbitrary. For he was not defining a feminine quality—he was defining a human quality, surely more commonly found among members of his own sex.
“No”—he clamped his lips around his pipe stem, puffed and grinned—“no, Pete has done a funny thing, a very funny thing. The exasperating part of it is that he will never know. Do you get me?”
“Not exactly.”
“Why—Pete's the original George W. Dogberry. He has described himself. That little analysis is a picture of his own life these past years. Could anything illustrate it more perfectly than the way he stole that play to-night? Self-interest? Self-expression? That's Pete. Hunting the delicate bits?” He checked himself; he had not told Sue about Maria Tonifetti. He didn't propose to tell her. “When has he built a home? When has he reared any young? When has he failed to assert his Nictzschean ego? When has he failed to yield to the Freudian wish? Who, I wonder, has free-loved more widely. Why, not Hy Lowe himself. And poor Hy is a chastened soul now. Betty's got him smothered, going to marry him after the divorce—if he has a job then. Waters Coryell told me.... No”—he removed his pipe and blew a meditative ring of smoke—“no, dear little girl, whatever the pestiferous Pete may think, or think he thinks, you are not the Truffler. Not you! No, the Truffler is Peter Ericson Mann.”
They wandered heme at one o'clock—home to the dingy little apartment on Tenth Street that had been her rooms and later his rooms. It was their rooms now. And the old quarters were not dingy, or bare or wanting in outlook, to the two young persons who let themselves in and stood silently, breathlessly there, she pressing close to his side; they were a gulden palace, brushed by wings of light.
“Henry,” she whispered, her arms about his neck, her wet face on his breast, her heart beating tumultuously against his—“Henry, I want us to build a home, to—to produce...”
With awe and a prayer in his heart, he kissed her.