I told him how all my life I had been making houses for myself - in a corner of the attic in my parents' house in Missouri, in clearings among lodgepole pines in the Adams foothills, in offices I shared with other teachers. My nesting and my neatening were compulsions in me that Theron looked on as plebeian, anti-intellectual, lace-curtain Irish; he said I wanted to spend my life in a tub of warm water, forswearing adventure but, worse, forswearing commitment. My pride of house was the sin of pride.
-Jean Stafford, An Influx of Poets, a story (extract of an autobiographical novel?)
