Now everything is explained. I took you at your
word; I believed in you and your husband and looked up to you as
literary people--people who were interested in fine and ennobling
things. I admired you for the very reason that I thought you didn't
care, and that you didn't need to care, about society and fashionable
position. I kept saying to you that I envied you your tastes, and let
you see that I considered myself your real inferior in my determination
to attract attention and oblige society to notice us. I was guileless
and simpleton enough to tell you of my progress--things I would have
blushed to tell another woman like myself--because I considered you the
embodiment of high aims and spiritual ideas, as far superior to mine as
the poetic star is superior to the garish electric light. I thought it
might amuse you to listen to my vanities. Instead, it seems you were
masquerading and were eating your heart out with envy of me--poor me.
You were ambitious to be like me."
"I wouldn't be like you for anything in the world."
"You couldn't if you tried. That's one of the things which this
extraordinary interview has made plain beyond the shadow of a doubt. You
are aching to be a social success. You are not fit to be.
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