“Trying--yes! A girl has to appear to be doing something.”
Again he looked about the sprightly room; deliberately thinking. Once she glanced up at him; then waited.
“Sue,” he said, “I think I see you a little more clearly. If I'm wrong, correct me. You have an unusual amount of strength--or something. I don't know what it is. I'll fall back on the safe old word, personality. You've got plenty of intelligence. And your stage work, your dancing--you're gifted as all get-out. But you're like clockwork, you're no good unless your mainspring is working. You have to be wound up.”
For the first time in this talk Sue's green-brown eyes lighted. She leaned over the table now and spoke with a flash of feeling.
“That's it, I believe,” she said. “I've got to feel deeply--about something. I've got to have a religion.”
“Exactly, Sue. There's a fanatical strain in you. You came into the Village life fresh from college with a whole set of brand-new enthusiasms. Fanatical enthusiasms. The attitude toward life that most of us take for granted--like it, feel it, just because it is us--you came at us like a wild young Columbus. You hadn't always believed it.”
“I always resented parental authority,” said she. “Yes, I know. I'm not sure your revolt wasn't more a personal reaction than a social theory. They tried to tie you down. Your father--well, the less said about him the letter. Preaching that old, old, false stuff, commercializing it, stifling your growth.”
“Very good. But the home was a conspiracy against you. His present wife isn't your mother, you told me once.”
“Well”--he paused, thinking hard--“look here, Sue, what in thunder are you to do! You're no good without that mainspring, that faith.”
She was silent, studying the table between them--silent, sober, not hostile. Life was not a joyous crusade; it was a grim dilemma. And an insistent pressure. She knew this now. The very admiration she felt for this strong man disarmed her in resisting him. He told the bald truth. She had fought him away once, only to involve herself with the impossible Peter; an experience that now left her the weaker before him. He knew this, of course. And he was a man to use every resource in getting what he wanted. There was little to object to in him, if you accepted him at all. And she had accepted him. As in a former crisis between them, he made her feel a coward.