the life you save may be your own.

chapter one: experience. page twenty seven.

the way he tells it, everybody in the village was caught between contradictory ideals of how to live. they were parochial greenwich villagers yet they insisted they were "citizens of the world." they pronounced themselves exiles from the bourgeois society but yearned to speak for america. they were incurable city people who romanticized rural country life. they were populists, confident in the will of the people, yet fancied themselves an avant-garde.

those ideals could not be reconciled, and when the war came, says cowley, "people were suddently forced to decide what kind of rebels they were"; and for day (dorothy) the ensuing "war in bohemia" became a war in her own character, a war between a life of experience for its own sake and a life of the experience undertaken for the benefit of others.