"Absolutely. I've ideas enough to fill fifty ordinary lifetimes. I'm simply seething with them. Why, that box over there in the corner is full of plays that would start a national drama if the fool public had sense enough to see what they are about. The trouble is that they don't want life on the stage; they want a kind of theatrical wedding-cake. And, by Jove, they get it! Any dramatist who tries to force people to eat bread and meat when they are crying for sugar plums may as well prepare to starve until the public begins to suffer from acute indigestion. Then, if he isn't dead--or, perhaps, if he is--his hour will come, and he will get his reward either here or in heaven." "So you'll go on just the same and wait until they're ready for you?" asked Susan, laughing from sheer pride in him. "You'll never, never cheapen yourself, Oliver?" For the first time in her life she was face to face with an intellectual passion, and she felt almost as if she herself were inspired. "Never. I've made my choice. I'll wait half a century if need be, but I'll wait. I know, too, what I am talking about, for I could do the other thing as easily as I could eat my dinner. I've got the trick of it. I could make a fortune to-morrow if I were to lose my intellectual honesty and go in simply for the making of money. Why, I am a Treadwell, after all, just as you are, my dear cousin, and I could commercialize the stage, I haven't a doubt, as successfully as your father has commercialized the railroad. It's in the blood--the instinct, you know--and the only thing that has kept it down in me is that I sincerely--yes, I sincerely and enthusiastically believe that I am a genius. If I didn't, do you think I'd stick at this starvation business another fortnight? That's the whole story, every blessed word of it, and I'm telling you because I feel expansive to-night--I'm such a tremendous egoist, you know, and because--well, because you are Susan." "I think I understand a little bit how you feel," replied Susan. "Of course, I'm not a genius, but I've thought sometimes that I should almost be willing to starve if only I might go to college." Checking the words on his lips, he looked at her with sympathy. "It's a shame you can't, but I suppose Uncle Cyrus won't hear of it." "I haven't asked him, but I am going to do it. I am so afraid of a refusal--and, of course, he'll refuse--that I've lacked the courage to speak of it." "Good God! Why is one generation left so absolutely at the mercy of the other?" he demanded, turning back to the strip of sky over the roof. "It makes a man rage to think of the lives that are spoiled for a whim. Money, money--curse it!--it all comes to that in the end. Money makes us and destroys us." "Do you remember what father said to you the other night--that you would come at last to what you called the property idea and be exactly like James and himself?"