“There,” said she, “I did hurt you. I must have been perfectly outrageous.”
He made no reply to this; merely mopped his forehead again and strode along. The pains were shooting above the insteps now, clear up into the calves of his legs.
“I ought to have made myself plainer,” said she. “I remember talking as if you couldn't write at all. Of course I didn't mean that, and I had no right to act as if I held myself superior to a man of your experience. That was silly. What I really meant was that you didn't write from a point of view that I could accept.”
“What you said was,” observed Peter, aiming at her sort of good-humored directness, and missing, “'the difficulty is, it's the whole thing—your attitude toward life—your hopeless sentimentality about women, the slushy horrible Broadway falseness that lies back of everything you do—the Broadway thing, always.'... Those were your words.”
“Oh, no!” She was serious now. He thought she looked hurt, almost. The thought gave him sudden savage pleasure. “Surely, I didn't say that.”
“You did. And you added that my insight into life is just about that of a hardened director of one-reel films.”
She was hurt now. She walked on for a little time, quite silent.
Finally she stopped short, looked right at him, threw out her hands (he noted and felt the grace of the movement!) and said—
“I don't know how to answer you. Probably I did say just about those words.”
“They are exact... and of course, in one sense, I meant them. I do feel that way about your work. But not at all in the personal sense that you have taken it. And I recognize your ability as clearly as anybody. Can't you see, man—that's exactly the reason I talked that way to you?” There was feeling in her voice now. “I suppose I had a crazy, kiddish notion of converting you, of making you work for us. It was because you are so good at it that I went after you like that. You are worth going after.” She hesitated, and bit her lip. “That's why I was so pleased when Zanin thought he needed you for our big plan and disappointed now that he can't include you in it—because you could help us and we could perhaps help you. Yes, disappointed—in spite of—and—and don't forget the other thing I said, that those of us that believe in truth in the theater owe it to our faith to get to work on the men that supply the plays.... Can't you see, man!”