"A woman's novel?" I asked.
"Meant to be," said he. "Study of a woman all through. Begins as a little girl—different, you know—sensitive, does a whole lot of thinking that her family doesn't follow. Tries to tell 'em at first, but finds herself in bad. Then keeps quiet for years—putting on power and beauty in the good old way of bumps and misunderstanding. She's pure white fire presently—body and brain and something else asleep. She wants to be a mother, but the ghastly sordidness of the love stories of her sisters to this enactment, frightens her from men and marriage as the world conducts it——"
"I follow you," said I.
"Well, I'm not going to do the novel here for you," he added. "You wouldn't think there was a ray of light in it from this kind of telling. A man who spends five months of his best hours of life in telling a story, can't do it over in ten minutes and drive a machine at the same time——"
"We're getting out of the crowd. What did the girl do?" I asked.
"Well, she wanted a little baby—was ready to die for it, but had her own ideas of what the Father should be. A million women—mostly having been married and failed, have thought the same thing here in America—pricked the unclean sham of the whole business. Moreover, they're the best women we've got. There are——"
He purposely shook the hat from his head—back into the seat—at this point.
"There are some young women coming up into maturity here in America—God bless 'em—who are almost brave enough to set out on the quest for the Father of the baby that haunts them to be born.... That's what she did. He was a young man doing his own kind of work—doctoring among the poor, let us say, mainly for nothing—killing himself among men and women and babies; living on next to nothing, but having a half-divine kind of madness to lift the world.... She saw him. You can picture that. They were two to make one—and a third. She knew. There was a gold light about his head which she saw—and some of the poverty-folk saw—but which he didn't know the meaning of, and the world missed altogether.
"She went to him. It's cruel to put it in this way.... I'm not saying anything about the writing or about what happened, but the scene as it came to me was the finest thing I ever tried to put down. We always fall down in the handling, you know.... I did it the best I could.... No, I'm not going to tell you what happened. Only this: a little afterward—along about page two hundred of the copy—the woman's soul woke up."
"Why not, in God's name?" I asked.