"What ought I to have been?"
"How can I tell? A Goethe, perhaps—a Goethe smothered by a twentieth-century environment. Your love of adventure isn't dead, it's been merely misdirected, real adventure, I mean, forth faring, straying into unknown paths. Perhaps you haven't yet found yourself."
"How uncanny!" I said, stirred and startled.
"You have a taste for literature, you know, though you've buried it. Give me Turgeniev. We'll begin with him…."
Her reading and the talks that followed it were exciting, amazingly stimulating…. Once Nancy gave me an amusing account of a debate which had taken place in the newly organized woman's discussion club to which she belonged over a rather daring book by an English novelist. Mrs. Dickinson had revolted.
"No, she wasn't really shocked, not in the way she thought she was," said
Nancy, in answer to a query of mine.
"How was she shocked, then?"
"As you and I are shocked."
"But I'm not shocked," I protested.
"Oh, yes, you are, and so am I—not on the moral side, nor is it the moral aspect that troubles Lula Dickinson. She thinks it's the moral aspect, but it's really the revolutionary aspect, the menace to those precious institutions from which we derive our privileges and comforts."