Every sense, long denied, called for her: every
need of my body and my soul, as waking from a trance, fused in a single
passionate direction: moving toward Mildred, drawing Mildred to me. But my work is not the sort that the world pays for. That is no reason
to abandon it. I cannot bring to Mildred a man wrecked of his place in
the world. It is John Mark, scientist, who needs her. It is Mildred
Fayn, as she lives now in her high artistry of leisure, whom I need. I cannot make of her splendor a cook or a drudge. Nor can I live with
her splendor as she must be lived with, outside of my career of pure
abstracted thought. How clear it is! and how awkwardly I speak! this evening at table with
my parents. I had despaired before I began. Why did I come? What else
was there to do? Their refusal was as vague as my pleading for what my mind knew as the
crucial cause of my life. Even as I spoke, I criticized and marveled at
my weakness.--What is the matter with you? You don’t lack persuasion,
nor power, nor weight of will. For a hundred lesser causes you have
done hundredfold better. What is the matter?... Mother put me off. “Dear, there’s no hurry,” she said. “Wait and see. You’re at the
beginning of your career. Don’t you need all your energy for that? If
Miss Fayn is truly the woman you should have, she’ll wait for you:
she’ll give up a few fur coats to have you.”

Her black eyes blazed. In them I saw:

“If I had you really--you, my boy and my body!--I should be happy,
living in a kitchen.”

But her mind and her senses were, each, the slave of the other. Her
senses did not dare to be happy. In all her life, she had foregone the
arduous and heroic way of happiness. So now, she suppressed her avowal. She knew nothing about it. But for this intimate death, she prepared
to take revenge on her son whom she loved, and on her son’s loved woman. My father lighted his cigar, and as usual sagged into the ease of his
wife’s will. “I put you through eight years of college,” he began. He examined his
Corona. He moistened a finger and applied it to a crack in the rich
black leaf. “Some day you’ll get all we have. If you want some cash--up
to five thousand--it’s yours. What more have you got the right to ask? If you marry, like every other married man, you got to look out for
yourself.” He puffed slowly: more rapidly, as a thought at last came to
his assistance. “I suppose your mother and I should move to a shoddy
flat, so you and Harry Fayn’s daughter can live in a swell one? You’ll
buy our motor, I guess?... Why, when I was your age, my father----”

I did not argue. I did not point out to him the false exaggeration
of his picture. I did not show him that at my age his work had been
to help his father invest his money so that neither of them should
ever need to use their minds: that indeed neither of them had ever
used their minds, and that the fair consequence had been ... so far
beyond the ugliness of their thoughts ... that I was able wholly,
passionately, greatly, to give all my mind, all my life to the white
flame of intellectual creation. But even this flame needed its
nourishment: was it logical to bring this light to being and then let
it die? The gross man is nourished with gross food: the indifferent
man with any food at all. My high work called for high fuel. Not for a
drudge, not for a harried woman, nor a pretty one, nor for promiscuous
pleasures. For Mildred! the essential Mildred! Nothing less. And the
proof was that ere I had found the perfection of her love, I had not
been nourished at all. Rather than blemish the fine growth of my life,
I had lived on myself, until I had found my equal....

Of all this, I said naught. I kissed my mother’s accurately rouged
cheek: I touched my father’s hand, its soft complacence gave me a
savage turn. I went quickly to the door. My mother stopped me. “John, I want you to come back. Are you free Saturday? ... in the
afternoon? I’ll stay at home. Nothing has been decided. You must not be
hasty. I want to see----”

I saw them: so impervious and healthy.--From their stubbornness, my
will: from their sheer animal strength, my mental power.... So flashed
my thought, but not in irony: a cool constatation. I said:

“There is nothing for you to see. It doesn’t matter. And everything has
been decided.”

... I was in the street. And I had forgotten my words, impetuous,
boastful words that seemed to mean nothing at all. For in my
consciousness there was the knowledge that nothing had been decided:
that my great need of winning Mildred and of having her right was
farther from fulfillment than it had ever been.--Better go back, and
not be proud: win your mother, said my reason. I knew I would not go
back. _c_

I had left early, too early to rush precipitate to Mildred. There was
time to walk to her, and in the blind congestion of my thoughts the
need of walking. Spring was a haze within the quiet street. The houses were high gray
walls of emptiness. Their windows told of no life. Life was a fertile
hush dreaming inchoate like a stirless sea against these rocks of
houses. I walked as through some elemental birth, æons anterior to
men and cities; through sleepy and vast densities scarce sparked with
consciousness. A monster too dull to be savage, too close still to the
protoplasmic slime, was this Spring world sprawled upon the stone hills
of the city. And as I walked within its palpable mood, my own thoughts
clashed like cymbals in a night: their strident clarities were like a
wound gashed in its somnolent flesh. My thoughts stood apart from the city, and from myself, and from
each other. I knew that I had come to a crisis in my years. I needed
Mildred and I needed my work. To forego my impecunious glory upon the
laboratory battlefield meant death. To fail of Mildred seemed to mean
death, also. How could I have them both? I had not even wooed her. Her
brilliant being stood beyond any touch or any claim of mine. Had she
been a woman whom I could bind with sentimental promise or engage with
the zest of fighting with me toward a dim future, she had not been
Mildred. She was alive, gloriously, luminously alive. Like a flame
she spent herself in the day, and she might be gone to-morrow. Even
now, I could not tell but there was possibly another’s love to fuel
her. But even if she could wait, could I? I knew at last the desperate
price of my abstaining years. There was stored up in me a might of
energy, continent, compressed, and the fire touched it. I was fire--a
white totality of active hunger, kindling, devouring in a moment the
years’ accumulated burden. I needed Mildred; and needed her perfectly;
and needed her at once. I could not take her hidden, meanly, without
killing my great need ere its fulfillment. All the ways of an inherited
culture had this night for me their reason. Beauty and amenity of
place, the lovely stuffs wealth has created for its homes and bodies
... I saw them all as acolytes of my essential worship.