you
were made for something different, that in spite of your success you
have missed your 'metier.'"

"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."

I considered this, and laughed.

"What's the use of being a humbug about it," said Nancy.

"But you're talking like a revolutionary," I said.

"I may be talking like one, but I'm not one. I once had the makings
of one--of a good one,--a 'proper' one, as the English would say." She
sighed.

"You regret it?" I asked curiously.

"Of course I regret it!" she cried. "What woman worth her salt doesn't
regret it, doesn't want to live, even if she has to suffer for it?
And those people--the revolutionaries, I mean, the rebels--they live,
they're the only ones who do live. The rest of us degenerate in a
painless paralysis we think of as pleasure. Look at me! I'm incapable
of committing a single original act, even though I might conceive one.
Well, there was a time when I should have been equal to anything and
wouldn't have cared a--a damn."

I believed her....

I fell into the habit of dropping in on Nancy at least twice a week on
my way from the office, and I met her occasionally at other houses. I
did not tell Maude of that first impulsive visit; but one evening a few
weeks