But I was not in the least interested in Miss Filette's psychology. What
I was trying to get at was the source of the creative mood which I was
sensible did not arise from anything Miss Filette was, but from what
Jerry was able to think of her. I admitted it was a mood you had to be
helped to, but I wasn't going to accept it from any male compliment to
his inamorata. I set up Jerry's case alongside of Miss Dean and Manager
O'Farrell, and a kind of fine intolerance drove me from it as ships are
driven apart upon the tide.
It drove me back in the first instance upon what Pauline and Henry Mills
stood for in my life. I was full of a formless importunate capacity,
like the motor impulses of a paralytic, and I imagined a relief from it
in the shadow of some succoring male who, by assuming the traditional
responsibility of getting a living, should leave me free to produce the
perfect flower of Art. At the time I was as far from realizing as
Pauline, that she was eminently the sort of woman the sheltered life
produced; had Henry Mills been upon the market I should have seized upon
him promptly as the solution of all my difficulties.
Pauline did her best for me--that is to say, she brought out for me an
infinite variety and arrangement of the sentimentalized sex attractions
with which she charmed dull care from Henry's brow. It was only by
degrees that I perceived that the utter want of relativity of the
quality that was known in Evanston as True Womanliness, was due to its
being conditioned very much as I thought of myself as happiest to be. It
was not until Pauline went to the country for the hot weather without
making any sensible change in my affairs, that I began to understand how
little she contributed. What I chiefly missed was a place to walk to
when I went out for exercise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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