nd slave woman
had been--were out of place on the spirit which was incarnated in Susan.
Amid the cramping customs of the period, she moved large, free, and
simple, as though she walked already in the purer and more bracing air
of the future.

"I wish I could help you," she said, stooping to pick up a newspaper
from a pile on the floor. "Here, let me wrap that Spinoza. I'm afraid
the back will come off if you aren't careful."

"Of course a man has to work out his own career," he replied, as he
handed over the volume. "I doubt, when it comes to that, if anybody can
be of much help to another where his life's work is concerned. The main
thing, after all, is not to get in one's way, not to cripple one's
energy. I've got to be free--that's all there is about it. I've got to
belong to myself every instant."

"And you know already just what you are going to do? About your writing,
I mean."

"Absolutely. I've ideas enough to fill fifty ordinary lifetimes. I'm
simply seething with them. Why, that box over there in the corner is
full of plays that would start a national drama if the fool public had
sense enough to see what they are about. The trouble is that they don't
want life on the stage; they want a kind of theatrical wedding-cake.
And, by Jove, they get it! Any dramatist who tries to force people to
eat bread and meat when they are crying for sugar plums may as well
prepare to starve until the public begins to suffer from acute
indigestion. Then, if he isn't dead--or, perhaps, if he is--his hour
will come, and he will get his reward either here or in heaven."

"So you'll go on just the same and wait until they're ready for you?"
asked Susan, laughing from sheer pride in him. "You'll never, never
cheapen yourself, Oliver?" For the first time in her life she was face
to face with an intellectual passion, and she felt almost as if she
herself were inspired.

"Never. I've made my choice. I'll wait half a century if need be, but
I'll wait. I know, too, what I am talking about, for I could do the
other thing as easily as I could eat my dinner. I've got the trick of
it. I could make a fortune to-morrow if I were to lose my intellectual
honesty and go in simply for the making of money. Why, I am a Treadwell,
after all, just as you are, my dear cousin, and I could commercialize
the stage, I haven't a doubt, as successfully as your father has
commercialized the railroad. It's in the blood--the instinct, you
know--and the only