"Look at Cresswell. He doesn't wear corsets. He has an interesting, absorbing, unfettered life. He's using the muscles of his brain--strengthening them on some resisting substance. He's in the thick of it.... What fun! Planning, visioning things in his mind, and seeing them take form in the external. He's a builder. He wears an imperturbable mask. That's for defense; but behind it I sometimes see keen, powerful, calculating gleams in his eyes, and I want to know about them, but I can't.... I can't talk to him about any but surface things. I can't show him what is in my heart.... The corsets are between us. He's one of the great powers, and he's mine, a possession like the Kohinoor, but I do not fancy that the Kohinoor constitutes the queen's happiness. "What are Cresswell and I to each other, anyway? Why, he's my Kohinoor, a possession of great price which endows me with distinction, and runs my credit up into the millions. He's as brilliant and cold and secretive as his prototype. And I--I'm his doll, a very jewel of a doll. One of the prettiest in the world, wonderfully dressed, exquisitely marceled, faultlessly manicured. I can smile enchantingly, and open and shut my mouth to ask for what I want and what I don't want, particularly the latter, and lisp 'thank you' when he drops a diamond necklace or a ruby tiara into my lap. "I hate a man that puts me on a pedestal. Any woman does. He thinks I'm sugar and salt and will melt and break. I wish he'd come to me, just once, with some enthusiasm and hug me breathless. I'm tired of his everlasting chivalry and deference.... When he begins to treat me with reverence and guards my youth and all that, I'd like to swear at him like the disreputable parrot of a drunken sailor.... Wouldn't I surprise him? I wonder what he would do if I'd cut loose? Oh, dear, I wish he'd come home drunk some night and smash up some of this junk and--what is that phrase of Wallace Martin's--swipe me one; and then be penitent and remorseful and ashamed and human--instead of always being like a darned old statue of the American statesman with one hand thrust in the bosom of his frock-coat. "I wonder--I wonder--what kind of a husband Eugene would have made. Not one of the amiable, benign, deferential ones, anyway. What were those lines 'Gene used to say? "'Each life's unfulfilled, you see, And both hang patchy and scrappy. We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired, been happy!' "That's it--that's it--that's life. To sigh deep--to laugh free; to make your bed in hell, and then soar on the wings of the morning.... I'm young, beautiful. I have everything but experience. I mean to have it.... No wonder Eve took the apple the serpent offered, if she was as bored in the Garden of Eden as I am. I'd have bitten more than one, though. What is the use of living if you don't live?"