He nodded as he continued: "I sometimes feel the way the monkish fraternity did at Oxford when they claimed 'they banished God and admitted women.' I want a man-made world, womanless, without a single trace of romance or a good time. Not right, is it? Sometimes I think I'll crack under the pretense, go raving mad and scream out the whole miserable sham under which I live--and every time I indulge myself in such a reverie I find myself writing Beatrice an extra check and going with her to this thing or that, steel-hammer pulses beating at my forehead and a languor about even the attempt at breathing." Mary would have spoken but he rushed ahead: "I like this fire, this debris. Most people would curse at it--it's real and rather common, sort of plain boiled-dinner variety. It gives me an excuse to take time off from the eternal frolic. I'm glad when there's a strike or a row and I dig out of town to stay in a commercial hotel. I have to get away from the whole tinsel show. And yet it was what I wanted, was willing to play modern Faust to any Wall Street Mephistopheles----" "And you are sure it wasn't a Mephistopheles?" "Of course not--for that much I can draw a deep breath and give thanks--it was my own luck." "Other times, other titles," she murmured. "One time you told me what you thought of the future of American women, the all-round good fellows of the world--do you remember? I wish you had not told me. It's just another thing to irritate. I'm driven mad by trifles--I'm starved for a big tragedy; that's the way this craving for a fortune and a good time is playing boomerang. I'm so infernally weary of hearing about the cut-glass slipper heels of some chorus girl and so hungry to hear about a shipwreck, a new creed, a daring crime that----"