A Portrait

I found the following in 'The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald':

She will never be able to build a house. She hops herself up on crazy arrogance at intervals and wanders around the woods chopping down everything that looks like a tree. When she comes near to making a clearing it looks like too much to her like all the other clearings she's ever seen so she fills it up with rubbish and debris and is ashamed even to speak of it afterwards. Driven, ordered, organized from without, she is a very useful individual - but her dominant idea and goal is freedom without responsibility which is like gold without metal, spring without winter, youth without age, one of those maddening, coo-coo mirages of wild riches which make her a typical product of our generation. She is by no means lazy yet when she chops down a tree she calls it work - whether it is in the clearing or not. She makes no distinction between work and mere sweat- less in the last few years since she has had arbitrarily to be led or driven.