"Materialism is the right charge! I was steeped in it; all those girls were. It was the only thing any of us lived for. Girls sold themselves for material advantage; they loathed it, most of them, but they lied to themselves and tried to make the rest of us believe it was happiness. They knew, and we knew what it was and we knew, too, that they were helpless to do otherwise. "Then you came and made love to me on the same crass basis. I liked you, Dick. I didn't love you. I cared no more for you than I did for three or four men so I kept putting you off, never actually discouraging you to a point where you would give up. I was simply closing my eyes to the inevitable. "Now and then we met women, to us strange creatures, who did things. I never can make anyone understand how inferior I felt beside them. Why, I remember one little decorator who, because she was young and cheap, came to do my apartment over. I had her stay for dinner and she was quite overwhelmed with many things. "When she went away I cried from sheer envy ... and she was going down somewhere into Greenwich Village to sleep in a stuffy little studio. But she was _doing_ something. I used to feel guilty before my dressmaker and even my maid. I didn't understand why that was, then; it was not a sensation produced by reason; by intuition, rather. "And then I had to look at things as they were. I paid up everything and totaled my bank balance. Every source of income I had ever had was gone and I had left ... three hundred and two dollars. That was on a Friday, the Friday of our last week-end party at the Hollisters' in Westchester. "You talked to me again that night after we had been playing billiards. Dick, I had made up my mind to take you up. The words were on my lips; I was within a breath of telling you that it was a bargain, that I'd sell myself to you for the things you could buy me.... "I don't know why I didn't. Maybe it was this part of me I had never known until I came here, this part which enthuses so over what lies before me now, the part that used to envy the girls who did things. We went back to town and there was a letter for me from this little frontier law office, telling me I had inherited this ranch. I didn't sleep a minute. I was sole owner of a big business.... "I never can make you understand the relief I experienced! It meant money and money meant that I could go on in the old way, putting off the inevitable, blinding myself to what I actually was. "That was my motive in coming here: to turn this property into money. And no sooner had I made the acquaintance of these people than I began to learn that my point of view had been radically different from theirs. I had thought that money would give me the thing I wanted, independence and prestige; but I found that with them, with the best of them, anyhow, that sort of standing was not considered.