“I’ll listen,” he answered sullenly.
“All right. Then try to hear what I’m trying to say. Maybe my parents aren’t as sweet and loving and noble as yours. Maybe they’re climbers and kind of crumby at times. They are. But they are still my parents. Now, if Kit ever proposed and I said ‘Yes,’ a whole lot of very important and terrifying and real problems would come to an end forever. I wouldn’t love him—no. We wouldn’t have as many things in common as—other men I know. One other anyhow. But at least I’d never be in a spot where I’d wilt at the Sight of my own house and hate myself for working so hard and despise never getting ahead fast enough to keep up with the bills. Don’t you see, Chuck, either way it wouldn’t be a perfect deal?”
“Not if you keep it on a dollars-and-cents basis. No.”
“It keeps itself on that basis. Where might I be, either way, in ten more years? On one hand, with a lot of kids—probably bad-tempered, embittered, envious, and ready to slip out and have fun on the side if I got the chance. On the other hand, I’d have everything in the world, and so would my folks, and I wouldn’t be a physical wreck—”
“This is all a lot of nonsense,” he said.
“Women,” she answered, “shouldn’t ever try to tell men what they really think! What they have to consider —when men won’t!”
“Some men consider other matters are more important than living-room drapes.”
“Don’t you think I do, too!” Her voice was urgent. “What in hell, Charles Conner, do you think I’ve gotten to be twenty-four years old without marrying for? I’ll tell you. You. I’ve had hundreds of offers and chances to enlarge a friendship into a gold hoop. Rich men, bright men, men in college, men from Kansas City, New York-even. Only first you had to take another year for architecture. Architecture, of all the hard-to-learn, hard-to-rise-in things! Then, two years for the army. And now, who knows? What if they start a new little war someplace? Maybe I’ll be fifty when you can afford a wife.” She stopped very suddenly, caught her breath and stared in the dimness. “Charley,” she whispered, “you’re crying.”
He blew his nose. “Maybe I was,” he said unevenly. “It’s a little hard to take it-like that.
Brick by lousy brick. Maybe, Lenore, you better give up the marathon. Maybe you are right. It’s so damned hard for a guy to separate how he feels and what he wants-from the facts.”