ad." She reached up a hand and passed the fingers
soothingly through his hair. "Let it go around no more. Let us begin
anew, now. I loved you all the time. I know that I was weak in yielding
to my mother's will. I should not have done so. Yet I have heard you
speak so often with broad charity of the fallibility and frailty of
humankind. Extend that charity to me. I acted mistakenly. Forgive me."

"Oh, I do forgive," he said impatiently. "It is easy to forgive where
there is really nothing to forgive. Nothing that you have done requires
forgiveness. One acts according to one's lights, and more than that one
cannot do. As well might I ask you to forgive me for my not getting a
job."

"I meant well," she protested. "You know that I could not have loved you
and not meant well."

"True; but you would have destroyed me out of your well-meaning."

"Yes, yes," he shut off her attempted objection. "You would have
destroyed my writing and my career. Realism is imperative to my nature,
and the bourgeois spirit hates realism. The bourgeoisie is cowardly. It
is afraid of life. And all your effort was to make me afraid of life.
You would have formalized me. You would have compressed me into a two-by-
four pigeonhole of life, where all life's values are unreal, and false,
and vulgar." He felt her stir protestingly. "Vulgarity--a hearty
vulgarity, I'll admit--is the basis of bourgeois refinement and culture.
As I say, you wanted to formalize me, to make me over into one of your
own class, with your class-ideals, class-values, and class-prejudices."
He shook his head sadly. "And you do not understand, even now, what I am
saying. My words do not mean to you what I endeavor to make them mean.
What I say is so much fantasy to you. Yet to me it is vital reality. At
the best you are a trifle puzzled and amused that this raw boy, crawling
up out of the mire of the abyss, should pass judgment upon your class and
call it vulgar."

She leaned her head wearily against his shoulder, and her body shivered
with recurrent nervousness. He waited for a time for her to speak, and
then went on.

"And now you want to renew our love. You want us to be married. You
want me. And yet, listen--if my books had not been noticed, I'd
nevertheless have been just what I am now. And you would have stayed
away. It is all those damned books--"

"Don't swear," she interrupted.

Her reproof startled him. He broke into a harsh l