“What have I done?”
“You've stated our faith with a force and a fineness that Zanin, even, could never get. You've said it all for us.... Oh, I owe you an apology! Zanin told you part of the truth. I didn't dream—from your plays and things you have said—that you could do this.”
Peter looked at her now with breathless solemnity. “I've changed,” he said.
“Something has happened.”
“I'm not ashamed of changing.”
She smiled.
“Or of growing, even.”
“Of course not,” said she. “But listen! You don't know what you've done. Do you suppose I've been looking forward to this job—making myself sensationally conspicuous, working with commercial-minded people? Oh, how I've dreaded that side of it! And worrying all the time because the scenario wasn't good. It just wasn't. It wasn't real people, feeling and living; it was ideas—nothing but ideas—stalking around. That's Zanin, of course. He's a big man, he has got the ideas, but he hasn't got people, quite; he just doesn't understand women,... Don't you see,” she threw out her hands—“the only reason, the only excuse, really, for going through with this ordeal is to help make people everywhere understand Truth. And I've known—it's been discouraging—that we couldn't possibly do that unless it was clearly expressed for us.... Now do you see what you've done? It's that! And it's pretty exciting.”
“Zanin may not take it this way.”
“Oh, he will! He'll have to. It means so much to him. That man has lost everything at the Crossroads, you know. And now he is staking all he has left—his intelligence, his strength, his courage, on this. It means literally everything to him.”