Their refusal was as vague as my pleading for what my mind knew as the crucial cause of my life. Even as I spoke, I criticized and marveled at my weakness.—What is the matter with you? You don’t lack persuasion, nor power, nor weight of will. For a hundred lesser causes you have done hundredfold better. What is the matter?...
Mother put me off.
“Dear, there’s no hurry,” she said. “Wait and see. You’re at the beginning of your career. Don’t you need all your energy for that? If Miss Fayn is truly the woman you should have, she’ll wait for you: she’ll give up a few fur coats to have you.”
Her black eyes blazed. In them I saw:
“If I had you really—you, my boy and my body!—I should be happy, living in a kitchen.”
But her mind and her senses were, each, the slave of the other. Her senses did not dare to be happy. In all her life, she had foregone the arduous and heroic way of happiness. So now, she suppressed her avowal. She knew nothing about it. But for this intimate death, she prepared to take revenge on her son whom she loved, and on her son’s loved woman.
My father lighted his cigar, and as usual sagged into the ease of his wife’s will.
“I put you through eight years of college,” he began. He examined his Corona. He moistened a finger and applied it to a crack in the rich black leaf. “Some day you’ll get all we have. If you want some cash—up to five thousand—it’s yours. What more have you got the right to ask? If you marry, like every other married man, you got to look out for yourself.” He puffed slowly: more rapidly, as a thought at last came to his assistance. “I suppose your mother and I should move to a shoddy flat, so you and Harry Fayn’s daughter can live in a swell one? You’ll buy our motor, I guess?... Why, when I was your age, my father——”
I did not argue. I did not point out to him the false exaggeration of his picture. I did not show him that at my age his work had been to help his father invest his money so that neither of them should ever need to use their minds: that indeed neither of them had ever used their minds, and that the fair consequence had been ... so far beyond the ugliness of their thoughts ... that I was able wholly, passionately, greatly, to give all my mind, all my life to the white flame of intellectual creation. But even this flame needed its nourishment: was it logical to bring this light to being and then let it die? The gross man is nourished with gross food: the indifferent man with any food at all. My high work called for high fuel. Not for a drudge, not for a harried woman, nor a pretty one, nor for promiscuous pleasures. For Mildred! the essential Mildred! Nothing less. And the proof was that ere I had found the perfection of her love, I had not been nourished at all. Rather than blemish the fine growth of my life, I had lived on myself, until I had found my equal....
Of all this, I said naught. I kissed my mother’s accurately rouged cheek: I touched my father’s hand, its soft complacence gave me a savage turn. I went quickly to the door.