one thing, I honestly could not imagine
that words, names, meant so much to you." Fred was talking with the
desperation of a man who has put himself in the wrong and who yet feels
that there was an idea of truth in his conduct. "Suppose that you had
married your brakeman and lived with him year after year, caring for him
even less than you do for your doctor, or for Harsanyi. I suppose you
would have felt quite all right about it, because that relation has a
name in good standing. To me, that seems--sickening!" He took a rapid
turn about the room and then as Thea remained standing, he rolled one of
the elephantine chairs up to the hearth for her.

"Sit down and listen to me for a moment, Thea." He began pacing from the
hearthrug to the window and back again, while she sat down compliantly.
"Don't you know most of the people in the world are not individuals at
all? They never have an individual idea or experience. A lot of girls go
to boarding-school together, come out the same season, dance at the same
parties, are married off in groups, have their babies at about the same
time, send their children to school together, and so the human crop
renews itself. Such women know as much about the reality of the forms
they go through as they know about the wars they learn the dates of.
They get their most personal experiences out of novels and plays.
Everything is second-hand with them. Why, you COULDN'T live like that."

Thea sat looking toward the mantel, her eyes half closed, her chin
level, her head set as if she were enduring something. Her hands, very
white, lay passive on her dark gown. From the window corner Fred looked
at them and at her. He shook his head and flashed an angry, tormented
look out into the blue twilight over the Square, through which muffled
cries and calls and the clang of car bells came up from the street. He
turned again and began to pace the floor, his hands in his pockets.

"Say what you will, Thea Kronborg, you are not that sort of person. You
will never sit alone with a pacifier and a novel. You won't subsist on
what the old ladies have put into the bottle for you. You will always
break through into the realities. That was the first thing Harsanyi
found out about you; that you couldn't be kept on the outside. If you'd
lived in Moonstone all your life and got on with the discreet brakeman,
you'd have had just the same nature. Your children would have been the
realities then, probably. If they'd bee