I

I HAD a long conference with Phil the day after Susan’s departure, and we solemnly agreed that we must, within reasonable limits, give Susan a clear field; her desire to play a lone hand in the cut-throat poker game called life must be, so far as possible, respected. But we sneakingly evaded any definition of our terms. “Within reasonable limits;” “so far as possible” the vagueness of these phrases will give you the measure of our secret duplicity.

Meanwhile we lived on from mail delivery to mail delivery, and Susan proved a faithful correspondent. There is little doubt, I think, that the length and frequency of her letters constituted a deliberate sacrifice of energy and time, laid not reluctantly, but not always lightly on the altar of affection. It was a genuine, yet must often have been an arduous piety. To write full life-giving letters late at night, after long hours of literary labor, is no trifling effort of good will good will, in this instance, to two of the loneliest, forlornest of men. Putting aside the mere anodyne of work we had but one other effective consolation Jimmy; our increasing interest and joy in Jimmy. But, for me at least, this was not an immediate consolation; my taste for Jimmy’s prosaic companionship was very gradually acquired.

Our first word from Susan was a day letter, telephoned to me from the telegraph office, though I at once demanded the delivery of a verbatim copy by messenger. Here it is:

“At grand central safe so far new york lies roaring just beyond sister and togo tarry with the stuff near cab stand while I send. Love Mrs. Arthur snooped in vain now for it courage Susan whos afraid dont you be alonsen fan.”

Phil, the scholar, interpreted the last two verbatim symbols: “Allons, enfants!”

II

SUSAN TO ME

“Sister and I are at the nice old mid-Victorian Brevoort House for three or four days. Sister is calmly and courageously hunting rooms for us or, if not rooms, a room. She hopes for the plural. We like this quarter of town. It’s near enough publishers and things for walking, and it’s not quite so New Yorky as some others. What Sister is trying to avoid for us is slavery to the Subway, which is awful! But we may have to fly up beyond Columbia, or even to the Bronx, before we’re through. The hotel objected to Togo, but I descended to hitherto untried depths of feminine wheedle and justified them by getting my way. Sister blushed for me and herself but has since felt more confident about my chances for success in this wickedly opportunist world.

“Better skip this part if you read extracts to Phil; he’ll brood. But perhaps you’d better begin disillusioning him at once, for I’m discovering dreadful possibilities in my nature now the Hillhouse inhibitions seem remote. New York, one sees overnight, is no place for a romantic idealist Maltby’s phrase, not mine, bless Phil’s heart! but luckily I’ve never been one. Birch Street is going to stand me in good stead down here. New York is Birch Street on a slightly exaggerated scale; Hillhouse Avenue is something entirely different. Finer too, perhaps; but the world’s future has its roots in New Birch Street. I began to feel that yesterday during my first hunt for a paying job.

“I’ve plunged on shop equipment, since Jimmy says, other things being equal, the factory with the best tools wins that is, I’ve bought a reliable typewriter, and I tackled my first two-finger exercises last night. The results were dire mostly interior capitals and extraneous asterisks. I shan’t have patience to take proper five-finger lessons. Sister vows she’s going to master the wretched thing too, so she can help with copying now and then. There’s a gleam in her eye, dear wonderful! This is to be her great adventure as well as mine. ‘Susan, Sister & Co., Unlicensed Hacks Piffle While You Wait!’ Oh, we shall get on you’ll see. Still, I can’t truthfully report much progress yesterday or to-day, though a shade more to-day than yesterday. I’ve been counting callously on Maltby, as Phil disapprovingly knows, and I brought three short manufactured-in-advance articles for the Garden Ex. down with me. So my first step was to stifle my last maidenly scruple and take them straight to Maltby; I hoped they would pay at least for the typewriter. It was a clear ice-bath of a morning, and the walk up Fifth Avenue braced me for anything. I stared at everybody and a good many unattached males stared back; sometimes I rather liked it, and sometimes not. It all depends.

“But I found the right building at last, somewhere between the Waldorf and the Public Library. There’s a shop on its avenue front for the sale of false pearls, and judging from the shop they must be more expensive than real ones. Togo dragged me in there at first by mistake; and as I was wearing my bestest tailor-made and your furs, and as Togo was wearing his, plus his haughtiest atmosphere, we seemed between us to be just the sort of thing the languid clerks had been waiting for. There was a hopeful stir as we entered no, swept in! I was really sorry to disappoint them; it was horrid to feel that we couldn’t live up to their expectations.

“We didn’t sweep out nearly so well! But we found the elevator round the corner and were taken up four or five floors, passing a designer of de luxe corsets and a distiller of de luxe perfumes on the way, and landed in the impressive outer office of the Garden Ex.

“But how stupid of me to describe all this! You’ve been there twenty times, of course, and remember the apple-green art-crafty furniture and potted palms and things. Several depressed-looking persons were fidgeting about, but my engraved card score one for Hillhouse! soon brought Maltby puffing out to me with both hands extended. Togo didn’t quite cut him dead, but almost, and he insulted an entire roomful of stenographers on his way to the great man’s sanctum. My first sanctum, Ambo! I did get a little thrill from that, in spite of Maltby.

“Stop chattering, Susan stick to facts. Yes, Phil, please. Fact One: Maltby was surprisingly flustered at first. He was, Ambo! He jumped to the conclusion that I was down for shopping or the theaters, and assumed of course you were with me. So you were, dear our way! But I thought Maltby asked rather gingerly after you. Why?

“Fact Two: I did my best to explain things, but Maltby doesn’t believe yet I’m serious seemingly he can’t believe it, because he doesn’t want to. That’s always true of Maltby. He still thinks this must be a sudden spasm not of virtue; thinks I’ve run away for an unholy lark. It suits him to think so. If I’m out on the loose he hopes to manage the whole Mardi gras, and he needn’t hear what I say about needing work too distinctly. That merely annoyed him. But I did finally make him promise while he wriggled to read my three articles and give me a decision on them to-morrow. I had to promise to lunch with him then to make even that much headway. Oof!

“Meanwhile, I fared slightly better to-day. I took your letter to Mr. Sampson. The sign, Garnett & Co., almost frightened me off, though, Ambo; and you know I’m not easily frightened. But I’ve read so many of their books wonderful books! I knew great men had gone before me into those dingy offices and left their precious manuscripts to strengthen and delight the world. Who was I to follow those footsteps? Luckily an undaunted messenger boy whistled on in ahead of me so I followed his instead! By the time I had won past all the guardians of the sanctum sanctórum, my sentimental fit was over. Birch Street was herself again.

“And Mr. Sampson proved all you promised rather more! The dearest odd old man, full of blunt kindness and sudden whimsy. I think he liked me. I know I liked him. But he didn’t like me as I did him at first sight. Togo’s fault, of course. Why didn’t you tell me Mr. Sampson has a democratic prejudice against aristocratic dogs? I must learn to leave poor Togo at home if there ever is such a place! when I’m looking for work; I may even have to give up your precious soul-and-body-warming furs. Between them, they belie every humble petition I utter. Sister and I may have to eat Togo yet.

“Mr. Sampson only began to relent when I told him a little about Birch Street. I didn’t tell him much just enough to counteract the furs and Togo. And he forgave me everything when I told him of Sister and confessed what we were hoping to do found a home together and earn our own right to make it a comfy one to live in. He questioned me pretty sharply, too, but not from snifty-snoops like Mrs. Arthur.

“By the way, dear, she was on the train coming down, as luck would have it, in the chair just across from mine. Her questions were masterpieces, but nothing to my replies. I was just wretched enough to scratch without mercy; it relieved my feelings. But you’d better avoid her for a week or two if you can! I didn’t mind any of Mr. Sampson’s questions, though I eluded some of them, being young in years but old in guile. I’m to take him my poems to-morrow afternoon, and some bits of prose things the ones you liked. They’re not much more than fragments, I’m afraid. He says he wants to get the hang of me before loading me down with bad advice. I do like him, and the serpent having trailed its length all over this endless letter I truly think his offhand friendship may prove far more helpful to me than Maltby’s ! You can fill in the blank, Ambo. My shamelessness has limits, even now, in darkest New York.

“Good night, dear. Please don’t think you are ever far from my me-est thoughts. Now for that typewriter!”

III

SUSAN TO JIMMY

“That’s a breath-taking decision you’ve made, but like you; and I’m proud of you for having made it and prouder that the idea was entirely your own. I suppose we’re all bound to be more or less lopsided in a world slightly flattened at the poles and rather wobbly on its axis anyway. But the less lopsided we are the better for us, and the better for us the better for others and that’s one universal law, at least, that doesn’t make me long for a universal recall and referendum.

“Oh, you’re right to stay on at Yale, but so much righter to have decided on a broad general course instead of a narrow technical one! Of course you can carry on your technical studies by yourself! With your brain’s natural twist and the practical training you’ve had, probably carry them much farther by yourself than under direction! And the way you’ve chosen will open vistas, bring the sky through the jungle to you. It was brave of you to see that and take the first difficult step. “Il n’y a que lé premier pas qui coûte” but no wonder you hesitated! Because at your advanced age, Jimmy, and from an efficient point of view, it’s a downright silly step, wasteful of time and time you know’s money and money you know’s everything. Only, I’m afraid you don’t know that intensely enough ever to have a marble mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, a marble villa at Newport, a marble bungalow at Palm Beach, a marble steam yacht but they don’t make those of marble, do they!

“It’s so possible for you to collect all these marbles, Jimmy reelers, every one of them! if you’ll only start now and do nothing else for the next thirty or forty years. You can be a poor boy who became infamous just as easy as pie! Simply forget the world’s so full of a number of things, and grab all you can of just one. But I could hug you for wanting to be a man, not an adding-machine! For caring to know why Socrates was richer than Morgan, and why Saint Francis and Sainte-Beuve, each in his own way, have helped more to make life worth living than all the Rothschilds of Europe! Oh, I know it’s a paradox for me to preach this, when here am I trying to collect a few small clay marbles putting every ounce of concentration in me on money making, on material success! Not getting far with it, either so far.

“But what I’m doing, Jimmy, is just what you’ve set out to do I’m trying not to be lopsided. You’ve met life as it is, already; I never have. And I’d so love to moon along pleasantly on Ambo’s inherited money read books and write verses and look at flowers and cats and stars and trees and children and cows and chickens and funny dogs and donkeys and funnier women and men! I’d so like not to adjust myself to an industrial civilization; not to worry over that sort of thing at all; above everything, not to earn my daily bread. I could cry about having to make up my mind on such bristly beasts as economic or social problems!

“The class struggle bores me to tears yet here it is, we’re up against it; and I won’t be lopsided! What I want is pure thick cream, daintily fed to me, too, from a hand-beaten spoon. So I mustn’t have it unless I can get it. And I don’t know that I can you see, it isn’t all conscience that’s driving me; curiosity’s at work as well! But it’s scrumptious to know we’re both studying the same thing in a different way the one great subject, after all: How not to be lopsided! How to be perfectly spherical, like the old man in the nonsense rhyme. Not wobbly on one’s axis not even slightly flattened at the poles!”

“Hurrah for us! Trumpets!

“But I’m gladdest of all that you and Ambo are beginning at last to be friends. You don’t either of you say so it drifts through; and I could sing about it if I could sing. There isn’t anybody in the world like Ambo.

“As for Sister and me, we’re getting on, and we’re not. Sister thinks I’ve done marvels; I know she has. Marvels of economy and taste in cozying up our room, marvels of sympathy and canny advice that doesn’t sound like advice at all. As one-half of a mutual-admiration syndicate I’m a complete success! But as a professional author hum, hum. Anyway, I’m beginning to poke my inquisitive nose into a little of everything, and you can’t tell something, some day, may come of this. As the Dickens man said who was he? I hope it mayn’t be human gore. Meanwhile, one thing hits the most casual eye: We’re still in the double-room-with-alcove boarding-house stage, and likely to stay there for some time to come.”

IV

SUSAN TO PHIL

“Your short letter answering my long one has been read and reread and read again. I know it by heart. Everything you say’s true and isn’t. I’ll try to explain that for I can’t bear you to be doubting me. You are, Phil. I don’t blame you, but I do blame myself for complacency. I’ve taken too much for granted, as I always do with you and Ambo. You see, I know so intensely that you and Ambo are pure gold incorruptible! that I couldn’t possibly question anything you might say or do the fineness of the motive, I mean. If you did murder and were hanged for it, and even if I’d no clue as to why you struck I should know all the time you must have done it because, for some concealed reason, under circumstances dark to the rest of us, your clear eyes marked it as the one possible right thing to do.

“Yes, I trust you like that, Phil; you and Ambo and Sister and Jimmy. Think of trusting four people like that! How rich I am! And you can’t know how passionately grateful! For it isn’t blind trusting at all. In each one of you I’ve touched a soul of goodness. There’s no other name for it. It’s as simple as fresh air. You’re good you four good from the center. But, Phil dear, a little secret to comfort you just between us and the stars: So, mostly, am I.

“Truly, Phil, I’m ridiculously good at the center, and most of the way out. There are things I simply can’t do, no matter how much I’d like to; and lots of oozy, opally things I simply can’t like at all. I’m with you so far, at least peacock-proud to be! But we’re tremendously different, all the same. It’s really this, I think: You’re a Puritan, by instinct and cultivation; and I’m not. The clever ones down here, you know, spend most of their spare time swearing by turns at Puritanism and the Victorian Era. Their favorite form of exercise is patting themselves on the back, and this is one of their subtler ways of doing it. But they just rampantly rail; they don’t though they think they do understand. They mix up every passe narrowness and bigotry and hypocrisy and sentimental cant in one foul stew, and then rush from it, with held noses, screaming “Puritanism! Faugh!” Well, it does, Phil their stew! So, often, for that matter and to high heaven do the clever ones!

“But it isn’t Puritanism, the real thing. You see, I know the real thing for I know you. Ignorance, bigotry, hypocrisy, sentimentalism such things have no part in your life. And yet you’re a Puritan, and I’m not. Something divides us where we are most alike. What is it, Phil?

“May I tell you? I almost dare believe I’ve puzzled it out.

“You’re a simón-Puritan, dear, because you won’t trust that central goodness, your own heart; the very thing in you on whose virgin-goldness I would stake my life! You won’t trust it in yourself; and when you find it in others, you don’t fully trust it in them. You’ve purged your philosophy of Original Sin, but it still secretly poisons the marrow of your bones. You guard your soul’s strength as possible weakness something that might vanish suddenly, at a pinch. How silly of you! For it’s the you-est you, the thing you can never change or escape. Instead of worrying over yourself or others me? you could safely spread yourself, Phil dear, all over the landscape, lie back in the lap of Mother Earth and twiddle your toes and smile! Walt Whitman’s way! He may have overdone it now and then, posed about it; but I’m on his side, not yours. It’s heartier human-er more fun! Yes, Master Puritan more fun! That’s a life value you’ve mostly missed. But it’s never too late, Phil, for a genuine cosmic spree.

“Now I’ve done scolding back at you for scolding at me. But I loved your sermon. I hope you won’t shudder over mine?”

V

The above too-cryptic letter badly needs authoritative annotation, which I now proceed to give you at perilous length. But it will lead us far....

Though it is positively not true that Phil and I, having covenanted on a hands-off policy, were independently hoping for the worst, so far as Susan’s ability to cope unaided with New York was concerned; nevertheless, the ease with which she made her way there, found her feet without us and danced ahead, proved for some reason oddly disturbing to us both. Here was a child, of high talents certainly, perhaps of genius the like, at least, of whose mental precocity we had never met with in any other daughter much less, son of Eve! A woman, for we so loved her, endowed as are few women; yet assuredly a child, for she had but just counted twenty years on earth. And being men of careful maturity, once Susan had left us, our lonely anxieties fastened upon this crying fact of her youth; it was her youth, her inexperience, that made her venture suddenly pathetic and dreadful to us, made us yearn to watch over her, warn her of pitfalls, guide her steps.

True, she was not alone. Miss Goucher was admirable in her way; though a middle-aged spinster, after all, unused to the sharp temptations and fierce competitions of metropolitan life. It was not a house-mother Susan would need; the wolves lurked beyond the door shrewd, soft-treading wolves, cunningly disguised. How could a child, a charming and too daring child however gifted be expected to deal with these creatures? The thought of these subtle, these patient ones, tracking her tracking her chilled us to hours-long wakefulness in the night! Then with the morning a letter would come, filled with strange men’s names.

We compared notes, consulted together shaking unhappy heads. We wrote tactful letters to Heywood Sampson, begging him, but always indirectly, to keep an eye. We ran down singly for nights in town, rescued the verb was ours Susan and Miss Goucher from their West 10th Street boarding-house, interfered with their work or other plans, haled them the verb, I fear, was theirs to dinner, to the opera or theater, or perhaps to call on someone of ribbed respectability who might prove an observant friend. God knows, in spite of all resolutions, we did our poor best to mind Susan’s business for her, to brood over her destiny from afar!

And God knows our efforts were superfluous! The traps, stratagems, springes in her path, merely suspected by us and hence the more darkly dreaded, were clearly seen by Susan and laughed at for the ancient, pitiful frauds they were. The dull craft, the stale devices of avarice or lust were no novelties to her; she greeted them, en passant, with the old Birch Street terrier-look; just a half-mocking nod of recognition an amused, half-wistful salute to her gamin past. It was her gamin past we had forgotten, Phil and I, when we agonized over Susan’s inexperienced youth. Inexperienced? Bob Blake’s kid! If there were things New York could yet teach Bob Blake’s kid and there were many they were not those that had made her see in it “Birch Street on a slightly exaggerated scale”!

But, as the Greeks discovered many generations ago, it is impossible to be high-minded or clear-sighted enough to outwit a secret unreason in the total scheme of things. Else the virtuous, in the Greek sense, would be always the fortunate; and perhaps then would grow too self-regarding. Does the last and austerest beauty of the ideal not flower from this, that it can promise us nothing but itself! You can choose a clear road, yet you shall never walk there in safety: Chance that secret unreason lurks in the hedgerows, myriad-formed, to plot against you. “Helas!” as the French heroine might say. “Diddle-diddle-dumpling!” as might say Susan.... Meaning: That strain, Ambo, was of a higher mood, doubtless; but do return to your muttons.

Susan had reached New York late in November, 1913, and the letter to Phil dates from the following January. Barely two months had passed since her first calls upon Maltby and Heywood Sampson, but every day of that period had been made up of crowded hours. Of the three manufactured-in-advance articles for the Garden Ex., Maltby had accepted one, paying thirty dollars for it, half-rate Susan’s first professional earnings; but the manner of his acceptance had convinced Susan it was a mere stroke of personal diplomacy on his part. He did not wish to encourage her as a business associate, for Maltby kept his business activities rigidly separate from what he held to be his life; neither did he wish to offend her. What he wholly desired was to draw her into the immediate circles he frequented as a social being, where he could act as her patron on a scale at once more brilliant and more impressive.

So far as the Garden Ex. was concerned, his attitude from the first had been one of sympathetic discouragement. Susan hit off his manner perfectly in an earlier letter:

“’My dear Susan! You can write very delicate, distinctive verse, no doubt, and all that and of course there’s a fairly active market for verse nowadays, and I can put you in touch with some little magazines, a cote, that print such things, and even occasionally pay for them. They’re your field, I’m convinced. But, frankly, I can’t see you quite as one of our contributors and I couldn’t pay you a higher compliment!

“’You don’t suppose, do you, I sit here like an old-fashioned editor, reading voluntary contributions? No, my dear girl; I have a small, well-broken staff of writers, and I tell them what to write. If I find myself, for example, with a lot of parade interiors taken in expensive homes, I select four or five, turn ’em over to Abramovitz, and tell him to do us something on “The More Dignified Dining-Room” or “The Period Salon, a Study in Restfulness.” Abramovitz knows exactly what to say, and how to point the snobbish-but-not-too-snobbish captions and feature the best names. I’ve no need to experiment, you see. I count on Abramovitz. Just so with other matters. Here’s an article, now, on “The Flaunting Paeony.” Skeat did that, of course. It’s signed “Winifred Snow” all his flower-and-sundial stuff is and it couldn’t be better! I don’t even have to read it.

“’Well, there you are! I’m simply a purveyor of
standardized goods in standardized packages. Dull
work, but it pays.’

“‘Exactly!’ I struck in. ’It pays! That’s why I’m
interested. Sister and Togo and I need the
money!’”

As for the brilliant, intertwined circles frequented by Maltby as a social being, within which, he hoped to persuade Susan, lay true freedom, while habit slyly bound her with invisible chains well, they are a little difficult to describe. Taken generally, we may think of them as the Artistic Smart Set. Maltby’s acquaintance was wide, penetrating in many directions; but he felt most at home among those iridescent ones of earth whose money is as easy as their morals, and whose ruling passion for amusement is at least directed by aesthetic sensibilities and vivacious brains.

Within Maltby’s intersecting circles were to be found, then, many a piquant contrast, many an anomalous combination. There the young, emancipated society matron, of fattest purse and slenderest figure, expressed her sophisticated paganism through interpretative dancing; and there the fashionable painter of portraits, solidly arrived, exhibited her slender figure on a daring canvas made possible by the fatness of her purse at one of his peculiarly intimate studio teas. There the reigning ingenue, whose graceful diablerie in imagined situations on the stage was equalled only by her roguish effrontery in more real, if hardly less public situations off, played up to the affluent amateur patron of all arts that require an unblushing cooeperation from pretty young women. There, in short, all were welcome who liked the game and were not hampered in playing it by dull inhibitions, material or immaterial. It was Bohemia de luxe Bohemia in the same sense that Marie Antoinette’s dairy-farm was Arcady.

That Susan given her doting guardian, her furs, her Chow, her shadowy-gleaming, imaginative charm, her sharp audacities of speech would bring a new and seductive personality to this perpetual carnival was Maltby’s dream; she was predestined he had long suspected the tug of that fate upon her to shine there by his side. He best could offer the cup, and her gratitude for its heady drafts of life would be merely his due. It was an exciting prospect; it promised much; and it only remained to intoxicate Susan with the wine of an unguessed freedom. This, Maltby fondly assured himself, would prove no difficult task. Life was life, youth was youth, joy was joy; their natural affinities were all on his side and would play into his practiced hands.

Doubtless Phil and I must have agreed with him from how differently anxious a spirit! but all three of us would then have proved quite wrong. To intoxicate Susan, Maltby did find a difficult, in the end an impossible, task. He took her not unwilling to enter and appraise any circle from high heaven to nether hell to all the right, magical places, exposed her to all the heady influences of his world; and she found them enormously stimulating to her sense of the ironic. Maltby’s sensuous, quick-witted friends simply would not come true for Susan when she first moved among them; they were not serious about anything but refined sensation and she could not take their refined sensations seriously; but for a time they amused her, and she relished them much as Charles Lamb relished the belles and rakes of Restoration Drama: “They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairyland.”

To their intimate dinners, their intimate musical evenings, their intimate studio revels she came on occasion with Maltby as to a play: “altogether a speculative scene of things.” She could, in those early weeks, have borrowed Lamb’s words for her own comedic detachment: “We are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated for no family ties exist among them.... No deep affections are disquieted, no holy-wedlock bands are snapped asunder for affection’s depth and wedded faith are not the growth of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong.... Of what consequence is it to Virtue or how is she at all concerned?... The whole thing is a passing pageant.”

It is probable that Maltby at first mistook her interest in the spectacle for the preliminary stirrings of its spell within her; but he must soon have been aware for he had intelligence that Susan was not precisely flinging herself among his maskers with the thrilled abandon that would betoken surrender. She was not afraid of these clever, beauty-loving maskers, some of whom bore celebrated names; it was not timidity that restrained her; she, too, loved beauty and lilting wit and could feel joyously at ease among them for an hour or two once in a while. But to remain permanently within those twining circles, held to a limited dream, when she was conscious of wilder, freer, more adventurous spaces without ! Why should she narrow her sympathies like that? It never occurred to her as a temptation to do so. She had drunk of a headier cup, and had known a vaster intoxication. From the magic circle of her cedar trees, in that lonely abandoned field back of Mount Carmel, the imagination of her heart had long since streamed outward beyond all such passing pageants, questing after a dream that does not pass....

No gilded nutshell could bound her now; she could become the slave of no intersected ring.... Lesser incantations were powerless.

So much, then, for my own broad annotation of Susan’s letter to Phil! But I leave you with generalizations, when your interest is in concrete fact. Patience. In my too fumbling way I am ready for you there, as well.

VI

SUSAN TO JIMMY

“I suppose you’d really like to know what I’ve lately been up to; but I hardly know myself. It’s absurd, of course, but I almost think I’m having a weeny little fit of the blues to-night not dark-blue devils exactly say, light-blue gnomes! I hate being pushed about, and things have pushed me about, rather. It’s that, I think. There’s been too much of everything somehow

“You see, my social life just now is divided into three parts, like all Gaul, and as my business opportunities Midas forgive them! have all come out of my social contacts, I’ll have to begin with them. Maltby’s the golden key to the first part; Mr. Heywood Sampson, the great old-school publisher and editor-author, is the iron key to the second; and chance our settling down here on the fringes of Greenwich Village is the skeleton key to the third.

“I seem to be getting all Gaul mixed up with Bluebeard’s closets and things, but I’ll try to straighten my kinky metaphors out for you, Jimmy, if it takes me all night. But I assume you’re more or less up to date on me, since I find you all most brazenly hand me round, and since I wrote Phil and got severely scolded in return; deserved it, too all about Maltby’s patiently snubbing me as a starving author and impatiently rushing me as a possible member for his Emancipated Order of AEsthetic May-Flies I call it his, for he certainly thinks of it that way. Now Maltby and I have not precisely quarreled, but the north wind doth blow and we’ve already had snow enough to cool his enthusiasm. The whole thing’s unpleasant; but I’ve learned something. Result my occasional flutterings among the AEsthetic May-Flies grow beautifully less. They’d cease altogether if I hadn’t made friends to call them that with a May-Fly or two.

“One of them’s the novelist, Clifton Young, a May-Fly at heart but there’s a strain of Honeybee in his blood somewhere. It’s an unhappy combination all the talents and few of the virtues; but I like him in spite of himself. For one thing, he doesn’t pose; and he can write! He’s a lost soul, though thinks life is a tragic farce. Almost all the May-Flies try to think that; it’s a sort of guaranty of the last sophistication; but it’s genuine with Clifton, he must have been born thinking it. He doesn’t ask for sympathy, either; if he did, I couldn’t pity him and get jeered at wittily for my pains!

“Then there’s Mona Leslie, who might have been a true Honeybee if everybody belonging to her hadn’t died too soon, leaving her hopeless numbers of millions. Mona, for some reason, has taken a passing fancy to me; all her fancies pass. She sings like an angel, and might have made a career if it had seemed worth while. It never has. Nothing has, but vivid sensation from ascetic religion to sloppy love; and, at thirty, she’s exhausted the whole show. So she spends her time now in a mad duel with boredom. Poor woman! Luckily the fairies gave her a selfishly kind heart, and there’s a piece of it left, I think. It may even win the duel for her in the end. More and more she’s the reckless patron of all the arts, almost smothering ennui under her benefactions. She’d smother poor me, too, if I’d let her; but I can’t; I’m either not brazen enough or not Christian enough to let her patronize me for her own amusement. And that’s her one new sensation for the last three years!

“Still, I’ve one thing to thank her for, and I wish I could feel grateful. She introduced me, at one of her Arabian-Nightish soirees musicales, to Hadow Bury, proprietor of Whim, the smarty-party weekly review. In two years it’s made a sky-rocketing success, by printing the harum-scarumest possible comment on all the social and aesthetic fads and freaks of the day just the iris froth of the wave, that and that only. Hadow’s a big, black, bleak man-mountain. You’d take him for an undertaker by special appointment to coal-beef-and-iron kings. You’d never suspect him of having capitalized the Frivolous. But he’s found it means bagfuls of reelers for him, so he takes it seriously. He’s after the goods. He gets and delivers the goods, no matter what they cost. He’s ready to pay any price now for a new brand of cerebral champagne.

“Well, I didn’t know what he was when Mona casually dropped me beside him, but he loomed so big and black and bleak he frightened me till my thoughts chattered! I rattled on like this, Jimmy only not because I wanted to, but because having madly started I didn’t know how to stop. I made a fool of myself utter; with the result that he detected a slightly different flavor in my folly, a possibly novel bouquet let’s call it the ‘Birch Street bouquet.’ At any rate, he finally silenced me to ask whether I could write as I talked, and I said I hoped not; and he looked bleaker and blacker than ever and said that was the worst of it, so few amusing young women could! It seemed to be one of the more annoying laws of Nature.

“The upshot was, I found out all about him and his ambitions for Whim; and the fantastic upshot of that was, I’m now doing a nonsense column a week for him have been for the past five and getting fifty dollars a week for my nonsense, too! I sign the thing “Dax” a signature invented by shutting both eyes and punching at my typewriter three times, just to see what would happen. “Dax” happened, and I’m to be allowed to burble on as him I think Dax is a him for ten weeks; then, if my stuff goes, catches on, gets over I’m to have a year’s contract. And farewell to double-room-and-alcove for aye! Else, farewell Whim! So it must get over I’m determined! I stick at nothing. I even test my burble on poor Sister every week before sending it in. If she smiles sadly, twice, I seal up the envelope and breathe again.

“That’s my bird in the hand, Jimmy a sort of crazily screaming jay but I mustn’t let it escape.

“There’s another bird, though. A real bluebird, still in the bush and oh, so shy! And he lures me into the second and beautifulest part of all Gaul

“It’s no use, I’m dished! Sister says no one ever wrote or read such a monstrous letter, and commands me to stop now and go to bed. There’s a look in her eye she means it. Good-night and good luck I’ll tell you about my other two parts of Gaul as soon as I can, unless you wire me collect ’Cut it out!’ Or unless you run down you never have and learn of them that way. Why not soon?”

VII

Jimmy Kane took the hint, or obeyed the open request, in Susan’s letter and went down to New York for the week-end; and on the following Monday Miss Goucher wrote her first considerable letter to me. It was a long letter, for her, written recopied, I fancy in precise script, though it would have been a mere note for Susan.

My dear Mr. Hunt: I promised to let you know from time to time the exact truth about our experiment. It is already a success financially. Susan is now earning from sixty to seventy dollars a week, with every prospect of earning substantially more in the near future. Her satirical paragraphs and verses in “Whim” are quoted and copied everywhere. They do not seem to me quite the Susan I love, but then, I am not a clever person; and it is undeniable that “Who is Dax?” is being asked now on every hand. If this interest continues, I am assured it can only mean fame and fortune. I am very proud of Susan, as you must be.

But, Mr. Hunt, there is another side to my picture. In alluding to it I feel a sense of guilt toward Susan; I know she would not wish me to do so. Yet I feel that I must. If I may say so to you, Susan has quickened in me many starved affections, and they all center in her. In this, may I not feel without offense that we are of one mind?

If I had Susan’s pen I could tell you more clearly why I am troubled. I lack her gift, which is also yours, of expressing what I feel is going on secretly in another’s mind. Mr. Phar and a Mr. Young, a writer, have been giving Susan some cause for annoyance lately; but that is not it. Mr. Hunt, she is deeply unhappy. She would deny it, even to you or me; but it is true.

My mind is too commonplace for this task. If my
attempt to explain sounds crude, please forgive it
and supply what is beyond me.

I can only say now that when I once told you Susan could stand alone, I was mistaken. In a sense she can. If her health does not give way, life will never beat her down. But there are the needs of women, older than art. They tear at us, Mr. Hunt; at least while we are young. I could not say this to you, but I must manage somehow to write it. I do not refer to passion, taken by itself. I am old enough to be shocked, Mr. Hunt, to find that many brilliant women to-day have advanced beyond certain boundaries so long established. You will understand.

A woman’s need is greater than passion, greater even than motherhood. It is so hard for me to express it. But she can only find rest when these things are not lived separately; when, with many other elements, they build up a living whole what we call a home. How badly I put it; for I feel so much more than the conventional sentiments. Will you understand me at all if I say that Susan is homesick for a home she has never known and may never be privileged to know? With all her insight I think she doesn’t realize this yet; but I once suffered acutely in this way, and it perhaps gives me the right to speak. Of course I may be quite wrong. I am more often wrong than right.

I venture to inclose a copy of some lines, rescued last week from our scrap-basket. I’m not a critic, but am I wrong in thinking it would have been a pity to burn them? As they are not in free verse, which I do not appreciate as I should, they affected me very much; and I feel they will tell you, far more than my letter, why I am a little worried about Susan.

Young Mr. Kane informed me, when he was here on Sunday, that you and Professor Farmer are well. He seems a nice boy, though still a little crude perhaps; nothing offensive. I am confined to the room to-day by a slight cold of no consequence; I hope I may not pass it on to Susan. Kindly give my love to Sonia, if you should see her, and to little Ivan. I trust the new housekeeper I obtained for you is reasonably efficient, and that Tumps is not proving too great a burden. I am,

Respectfully yours,
MALVINA GOUCHER.

The inclosed “copy of some lines” affected me quite as much as they had Miss Goucher, and it was inconceivable to me that Susan, having written them, could have tossed them away. As a matter of fact she had not. Like Calais in the queen’s heart, they were engraven in her own. They were too deeply hers; she had meant merely to hide them from the world; and it is even now with a curious reluctance that I give them to you here. The lines bore no title, but I have ventured, with Susan’s consent, to call them

MENDICANTS

We who are poets beg the gods
Shamelessly for immortal bliss,
While the derisive years with rods
Flay us; nor silvery Artemis
Hearkens, nor Cypris bends, nor she,

The grave Athena with gray eyes.
Were they not heartless would they be
Deaf to the hunger of our cries?

We are the starving ones of clay,
Famished for deathless love, no less.

Oh, but the gods are far and fey,
Shut in their azure palaces!

Oh, but the gods are far and fey,
Blind to the rags of our distress!

We pine on crumbs they flick away;
Brief beauty, and much weariness.

And the night I read these lines a telegram came to me from New York, signed “Lucette Arthur,” announcing that Gertrude was suddenly dead....