"If you knew," she said, "what a futile, irresolute, irresponsible creature I am, you wouldn’t waste real love on me. There’s nothing to me except feminine restlessness, mental and physical, and it urges, urges, urges me to wander frivolously in pursuit of God knows what—_I_ don’t! But always my mind is a traveller impatient to go a-gypsying, and my feet beat the devil’s tattoo——"
She sprang from the pebbles to a flat river stone projecting from the shore and stood poised, looking out across the rushing water at the mist curling there along the crests of little hurrying waves. A firefly drifted through it; above, unseen, night-hawks called persistently. She turned her head toward him expectantly.
There was room enough on the rock and he stepped to her side.
"I’m like that water," she said, "making a futile noise in the world, dashing and rippling along without any plan of my own, any destination. When I’m honest with myself, I know that it isn’t the intellectual desire for self-expression that keeps me restless; it’s merely and solely the instinct to ripple and bubble and dance and flow out under the stars and sunsets and dawns—and go sparkling and swirling and glimmering purposelessly away out into the world at random.... And _that’s_ all there is to Stephanie Quest!—if you really desire to know—you very romantic and foolish boy, who think yourself in love with her!"
She looked up and laughed at his sober face.
"Dear novelist," she said, "it’s common realism, not romantic fiction, that has _us_ in its clutches. We’re caught by the commonplace. If life were only like one of your novels, with some definite beginning, an artistic plot full of action running toward a properly planned climax!—but it isn’t! It begins in the middle and ends nowhere. And here’s another trouble with real life; there aren’t any villains. And that’s fatal to me as your heroine, Jim, for I can’t be one unless I’m furnished with a foil."
"Steve," he said, "if you are not everything that my mind and heart believe you to be, the time is past when it makes any difference to me what you are."
"Oh, Jim, is it really as serious as that? Can you stand for a mindless, purposeless girl of unmoral and nomadic proclivities who really hasn’t a single gift—no self to express, no creative or interpretive talent—with nothing but an inordinate, unquiet curiosity to find out everything there is to find out—a mental gypsy, lazy, self-indulgent, pleasure-loving, irresponsible——"