—You are Fanny Dirk, Mrs. Luve.... I’ll keep that name! And you have gotten tired already, tired of what if you look and face it you will find all bundled and labelled in two years. Labelled to know, Bundled ... to throw out! That’s clear, though the facing, the training of my eyes and the opening of my mind to hold what I face, is going to be hard.... Here is an autumn day and a dear man trudging so you are alone with it. Day of glory, day of flame, day of death. The leaves are singing for they are going to fall. The trees are singing for they are going to sleep. The world is a maze of trumpeting insects, loomed with flutters of dry grass, trill of seed, for soon comes snow stillness. O Fanny, once you were Springtime! I hear a man talk blossom and I feel September. The bundles ... the labels ... two years inventoried! Aren’t you a business woman, Fanny, earning two thousand a year? A year ... two years. Each year has a Spring and a Fall. A third year might green if you burn away like these trees.
“It is simply,” she whispered to herself, and the man watched her mouth: “do I want to green like these trees?... When will I learn to think?”
She knew already what was to be.
She struggled only, she gave this full free day in the air only, to know Why. Did not the world have reasons? She had suffered losing two lives that grew within her flesh. She had asked Why, and in the questioning been rent away so even these agonies were dim: they were worlds dead like dim moons in the dawn of her adventure. And that adventure was Why!
—Why shall I say No very soon ... so very soon? Why am I going to leave the warm of this dear man, the ease, the goodness of it all—why am I going to push him back into new Emptiness?
She saw him that first day: his arms thrust out, nervous arms, haggard hands, hair wet ... business man! this big bumping child, bumping in Emptiness? Dear ... so good (she could see that at once as of a horse and a dog all in one, and his life a currycomb brushing wrong, a bone marrowless): now, back he goes into worse Emptiness. Why?
—Tell me trees....
I am not tired, I am rested.
In the arms of this man, with my face turned away, I have rested.
I can bear what you tell me....
I am hard like you.
... That afternoon, the ninth of beating about on pavement until pavement tumored upward through her legs, her bowels, her blood, stiffened her brain ... that afternoon she had felt strong again sudden.—So this is Business? this soft flesh in the hard City?
“Mr. Johns, you must let me have that place,” she told him very calmly.