“Simply that he doesn't rouse any emotional response in her. I'm not sure that she isn't a little sorry he doesn't. She would be honest you know. And that's the thing about Sue—my guess about her, at least—that she won't approach love as an experiment or an experience. It will have to be the real thing.”
He tried again, in his slow calm way, to hang a smoke ring on the brass hook.
“Proceed,” said Hy. “Your narrative interests me strangely.”
“Well,” said the Worm slowly, “Zanin is about ready to put over his big scheme. He has contrived at last to get one of the managers interested. And it hangs on Sue's personality. The way he has worked it out with her, planning it as a concrete expression of that half wild, natural self of hers, I doubt if it, this particular thing, could be done without her. It is Sue—an expressed, interpreted Sue.”
“This must be the thing he is trying to get Pete in on.”
“The same. Zanin knows that where he fails is on the side of popularity. He has intelligence, but he hasn't the trick of reaching the crowd. And he is smart enough to see what he needs and go after it.”
“He is going after the crowd, then?”
“Absolutely.”
“And what becomes of the noble artistic standards he's been bleeding and dying for?”
“I don't know. He really has been bleeding and dying. You have to admit that. He lives in one mean room, over there in Fourth Street. A good deal of the little he eats he cooks with his own hands on a kerosene stove. Those girls are always taking him in and feeding him up. He works twenty and thirty hours at a stretch over his productions at the Crossroads. Must have the constitution of a bull elephant. If it was just a matter of picking up money, he could easily go back into newspaper work or the press-agent game.... I'm not sure that the man isn't full of a struggling genius that hasn't really begun to find expression. If he is, it will drive him into bigger and bigger things. He won't worry about consistency—he'll just do what every genius does. he'll fight his way through to complete self-expression, blindly, madly, using everything that comes in his way, trampling on everything that he can't use.”