"Yes, my little lady, that's what you need." "What?" "To be waked up." "Oh, there you go again! Is there no limit to sex self-consciousness? I want to be a person in my work. An individual. Not first and foremost a woman!" "Why, my dear girl, you talk like a child! Sex is the very soul of art. The greatest songs have been sung and the greatest pictures painted because men and women have loved. Don't tell me a great big handsome creature like you doesn't realize that!" "Well, just the same," with feminine subjectiveness, "I mean to make my way as an individual first and a woman second. I give nothing to you men and I ask nothing except a fighting chance. I don't believe in all this pay-the-price business. I don't recognize you as the arbiters of my destiny. I'll pay my price with my ability, and if I can't pay up that way then I deserve to fail. Women can fight back at the world with something besides their sex. I intend to prove it." He closed tighter over her arm. "I like you when you tilt at windmills, Miss Don Quixote, and I like the way your eyes turn black." "There you are at it again." "Certainly; it's the law of life." "You mean it's the law of men! Why should you set the price of our success? We women are going to batter down the monopoly." "You're a regular little holy terror for woman's rights. Come in here for a drink and tell me about it." They were approaching the rapids of Broadway, the quickened torrent of the pleasure zone that leaps high in folly even under sunlight. Sidewalk humanity quickened and had a shove to it. Street cars and cabs plunged in seemingly impassable directions. Frivolity was showing her naked shoulder on lithograph roof garden and matinee stage. The Times Building stood like a colossus, breakwater to the tide. Rector's invited. "Come in for a drink," he repeated. She threw him a northwest glance with what for her amounted to quite an adventure in coquetry. "Aha!" in the key of burlesque. "Either I sully these fair lips with alcohol or to-morrow I awake jobless." He was visibly annoyed, dropping her arm and hurrying past the mirrored entrance. "You flatter yourself." She bit into her lips, again with a sense of her ridiculousness, confessing, in her stress and against the old inhibition, to a state of being unwell. "It isn't that, and you know it! I'm done up these last few days. Feeling seedy. It must be this Indian-summerish heat." "Poor pussy!" he said, again good-humored. It was true that a recurring sense of dizziness would sweep like a sudden wave over her, in street cars, even in bed before she rose mornings, and that very afternoon as she sang into the murky darkness a terrifying sense of it had threatened her.