“You’re not serious? Good Lord, we couldn’t do that! Why, it’s our home! Wouldn’t know what to do if we didn’t have a safe harbor like this to come back to! Why, we’ve built ourselves into this old place, from the Radiola to the new garage doors. I guess I know every dahlia in the garden by its middle name! I love the place the way I do Emily and you and the boy. Only place where we can slam the door and tell everybody to go to hell and be ourselves!”
“But perhaps we’ll get us some new selves, without losing the old ones. You’d—oh, you could be so magnificent, so tall and impressive and fine, if you’d let yourself be, if you didn’t feel you had to be just an accessory to a beastly old medium-priced car, if you’d get over this silly fear that people might think you were affected and snobbish if you demanded the proper respect from them! There are great people in the world—dukes and ambassadors and generals and scientists and—And I don’t believe that essentially they’re one bit bigger than we are. It’s just that they’ve been trained to talk of world-affairs, instead of the price of vanadium and what Mrs. Hibbletebibble is going to serve at her Halloween party. I’m going to be one of ’em! I’m not afraid of ’em! If you’d only get over this naive passion for ‘simplicity’ and all those nice peasant virtues and let yourself be the big man that you really are! Not meekly say to His Excellency that though you look like a grand-duke, you’re really only little Sammy Dodsworth of Zenith! He won’t know it unless you insist on telling him! … And perhaps an ambassadorship for you, after you’ve been abroad long enough to learn the tricks. … Only to do all that, to grab the world, we must not be bound by the feeling that we’re tied to this slow-pokey Zenith till death do us part from the fun of adventuring!”
“But to sell the house—”
“Oh, we don’t need to do that, of course, silly—not at first. I just mean it as an example of how free we ought to be. Of course we wouldn’t sell it. Heavens, we may be delighted to slink back here in six months! But don’t let’s plan to, that’s what I mean. Oh, Sam, I’m absolutely not going to let my life be over at forty—well, at forty-one, but no one ever takes me for more than thirty-five or even thirty-three. And life would be over for me if I simply went on forever with the idiotic little activities in this half-baked town! I won’t, that’s all! You can stay here if you insist, but I’m going to take the lovely things that—I have a right to take them, because I understand them! What do I care whether some club of human, or half-human, tabby-cats in eyeglasses study dietetics or Lithuanian art next year? What do I care whether a pretentious bunch of young millionaire manufacturers have an imitation English polo team? … when I could have the real thing, in England! And yet if we stay here, we’ll settle down to doing the same things over and over. We’ve drained everything that Zenith can give us—yes, and almost everything that New York and Long Island can give us. And in this beastly country—In Europe, a woman at forty is just getting to the age where important men take a serious interest in her. But here, she’s a grandmother. The flappers think I’m as venerable as the bishop’s wife. And they make me old, with their confounded respectfulness—and their charming rejoicing when I go home from a dance early—I who can dance better, yes, and longer, than any of them—”
“Now, now!”
“Well, I can! And so could you, if you didn’t let business sap every single ounce of energy you have! But at the same time—I only have five or ten more years to continue being young in. It’s the dernière cartouche. And I won’t waste it. Can’t you understand? Can’t you understand? I mean it, desperately! I’m begging for life—no, I’m not!—I’m demanding it! And that means something more than a polite little Cook’s trip to Europe!”
“But see here now! Do you actually mean to tell me, Fran, that you think that just moving from Zenith to Paris is going to change everything in your life and make you a kid again? Don’t you realize that probably most people in Paris are about like most people here, or anywhere else?”
“They aren’t, but even if they were—”
“What do you expect out of Europe? A lot of culture?”
“No! ‘Culture!’ I loathe the word, I loathe the people who use it! I certainly do not intend to collect the names of a lot of painters—and of soups—and come back and air them. Heavens, it isn’t just Europe! We may not stay there at all. It’s being free to wander wherever we like, as long as we like, or to settle down and become part of some community or some set if we like, and not feel that
