My cause is good. I have propounded subtler and more recondite problems. I am twenty-eight. With a power that is rare I have excluded from my life all the warm nurtures of friendship and of love. My needs have not died; it is as if they have in my austere years gone forth from me and gathered to one mastering presence: Mildred. When I saw her so it was with me. 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----”