"Above everything!" he exclaimed."Only the free _live_."She lifted her head higher in a graceful, attractive gesture of confidence and happiness."Well--I am ready to live.""I'm afraid you don't realize," he said hesitatingly."People wouldn't understand.You've your reputation to think of, you know."She looked straight at him."No--not even that.I'm even free from reputation." Then, as his face saddened and his eyes glistened with sympathy, "You needn't pity me.See where it's brought me.""You're a strong swimmer--aren't you?" he said tenderly."But then there isn't any safe and easy crossing to the isles of freedom.It's no wonder most people don't get further than gazing and longing.""Probably I shouldn't," confessed Susan, "if I hadn't been thrown into the water.It was a case of swim or drown.""But most who try are drowned--nearly all the women.""Oh, I guess there are more survive than is generally supposed.
So much lying is done about that sort of thing.""What a shrewd young lady it is! At any rate, you have reached the islands.""But I'm not queen of them yet," she reminded him."I'm only a poor, naked, out-of-breath castaway lying on the beach."He laughed appreciatively.Very clever, this extremely pretty young woman."Yes--you'll win.You'll be queen." He lifted his champagne glass and watched the little bubbles pushing gayly and swiftly upward."So--you've cast over your reputation.""I told you I had reached the beach naked." A reckless light in her eyes now."Fact is, I had none to start with.Anybody has a reason for starting--or for being started.That was mine, I guess.""I've often thought about that matter of reputation--in a man or a woman--if they're trying to make the bold, strong swim.To care about one's reputation means fear of what the world says.
It's important to care about one's character--for without character no one ever got anywhere worth getting to.But it's very, very dangerous to be afraid for one's reputation.And--Ihate to admit it, because I'm hopelessly conventional at bottom, but it's true--reputation--fear of what the world says--has sunk more swimmers, has wrecked more characters than it ever helped.
So--the strongest and best swimmers swim naked."Susan was looking thoughtfully at him over the rim of her glass.
She took a sip of the champagne, said: "If I hadn't been quite naked, I'd have sunk--I'd have been at the bottom--with the fishes----""Don't!" he cried."Thank God, you did whatever you've done--yes, I mean that--whatever you've done, since it enabled you to swim on." He added, "And I know it wasn't anything bad--anything unwomanly.""I did the best I could--nothing I'm ashamed of--or proud of either.Just--what I had to do.""But you ought to be proud that you arrived.""No--only glad," said she."So--so _frightfully_ glad!"In any event, their friendship was bound to flourish; aided by that dinner and that wine it sprang up into an intimacy, a feeling of mutual trust and of sympathy at every point.Like all women she admired strength in a man above everything else.She delighted in the thick obstinate growth of his fair hair, in the breadth of the line of his eyebrows, in the aggressive thrust of his large nose and long jawbone.She saw in the way his mouth closed evidence of a will against which opposition would dash about as dangerously as an egg against a stone wall.There was no question of his having those birthmarks of success about which he talked.She saw them--saw nothing of the less obtrusive--but not less important--marks of weakness which might have enabled an expert in the reading of faces to reach some rather depressing conclusion as to the nature and the degree of that success.
Finally, he burst out with, "Yes, I've made up my mind.I'll do it! I'm going to New York.I've been fooling away the last five years here learning a lot, but still idling--drinking--amusing myself in all kinds of ways.And about a month ago--one night, as I was rolling home toward dawn--through a driving sleet storm--do you remember a line in `Paradise Lost'""I never read it," interrupted Susan.
