Читать книгу Wickford Point - John P. Marquand - Страница 14

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I always enjoyed the informality of a summer morning at Wickford Point. What I enjoyed most was a unique lack of stimulus combined with the absence of a personal responsibility. Every summer morning at Wickford Point was like every other morning, bringing the consoling message that it would be wise to attempt nothing all day long. There was no tang to the morning air; but instead, the heavy lassitude of too many trees and of too much summer combined with a drowsy sound of enervated birds and a muddy murky odor from the river.

I had occupied the same room in the house at odd moments for most of my life. It was one of the least desirable rooms, but I had never cared to move out of it. When I awoke, a good many days after that evening when I had read the beginning of Allen Southby's novel, I could see the grooves which a tame squirrel of mine had once gnawed on the post of my bed. Looking at the ceiling I could see the same cracks, the directions of which I had learned by heart when I had lain there sick with scarlet fever. It had been predicted for the last twenty years that the ceiling was due to fall, but the cracks seemed no larger and no different. The ceiling was like the balance of power in Europe or like the tottering economic fabric of the nation and all of Wickford Point, ready to fall but never falling. In the meanwhile the cracks meandered toward the wall in the irrational outlines of rivers and continents, giving a good imitation of a slightly demented page in a geography. The whitewash had flaked off into deserts and mountain ranges. The corpses of occasional mosquitoes were like other geographic symbols. While lying in bed it was possible to embark on a voyage across that cracked ceiling. It got you nowhere, but the same might be said of other journeys.

I could see the mark where I had spilled acid on the claw-and-ball foot mahogany table. I could see the broken knobs of the empire bureau, and the rack where I kept my shotgun, and the hole in the Oriental carpet which my Irish water spaniel puppy had chewed twenty years before. I could see my perfunctory and undistinguished Harvard diploma, and a photograph, which was growing yellow, of the officers and men of Battery C of the Three Hundred and Something Artillery, Bay State Division, taken at Camp de Souge in France. There had been a time when I could name everyone of those hundred-odd men from left to right without hesitation. Once it would have seemed impossible that I could ever forget those faces, but now I was not sure which figure among the officers was my own. I could see the hole in the wall made by a revolver bullet from a boyhood weapon which I had not known was loaded—the putty still there, put in by Mr. Morrissey, who was the hired man then, so that Cousin Sue might not find out about it. I had been pretending that I was a cowboy or Daniel Boone or someone, and it was lucky that I had not shot off a finger. I had pretended that I was a lot of things in that room—a soldier, a fireman, a philosopher, a trapper, a poet and a great lover. No doubt I was still pretending.

When Aunt Sarah died it was suggested that I move to the front of the house, but I had grown used to my room by then. I liked the view from my window of the lawn and the hay barn and the green of the oak trees by the river. The back stairs were near it, making it possible to enter and leave in privacy, and I liked the sounds and smells of the kitchen.

It was a quarter before ten o'clock. I knew the hour, not only from the watch on the candle-stand by the bed but from the angle of the sunlight through the window. It was time to get up. I could never sleep as long as the others at Wickford Point.

Josie was in the kitchen and the flies were buzzing about some unwashed dishes in the soapstone sink. She was feeding something out of a tin cup to Herman, her youngest child. The contents of the cup dribbled down Herman's chin and onto his rompers. The old setter got up and hit his head on the kitchen table and sat down again.

"I don't know how it is, Mr. Calder," said Josie, "Herman just doesn't seem to eat right. I've told him again and again not to slobber, but the poor little thing, it doesn't seem to go down the right way."

"I'll have my breakfast in here," I said. "I'd like some coffee and a boiled egg."

"Yes, Mr. Calder," Josie said. "I've got some water boiling right now. Don't rub against Mr. Calder, Herman darling. I was just saying to Frieda last night that I did hope you wouldn't be starting away somewhere and leaving us. Frieda thought you might be going somewhere, the way you do. There are only two eggs, Mr. Calder. They forgot to get any groceries yesterday, and I have been asking and asking for some more soap. Dear Mrs. Wright is so forgetful. She was going to send downtown yesterday, but Miss Bella went off somewhere and then Mr. Sidney got her pocketbook."

"What did he do with her pocketbook?" I asked.

"He took it with him to the beach," Josie said, "and then dear Mrs. Wright was going to cash a check, but no one could find her checkbook, and so she said it could wait until today. And Mr. Calder, Earle has been so worried, that poor boy was crying when he was cutting the grass this morning."

"What was he crying for?" I asked.

"That poor boy," Josie said, and wiped her hands on her dress and took the coffeepot off the stove, "that poor boy was just crying because he hasn't got any money. Earle is such a sensitive boy, and Frieda has so much attention. The nicest boys have always liked Frieda, even if she hasn't got the clothes that some of the girls have. Of course I sew and sew and do everything I can, and then Miss Bella gave her that dress, the one with the pink dots on it that she spilt the rum punch on last week. The dear girl is so proud of that dress, Mr. Calder, and she wanted to wear it but Earle has never been paid, so he just can't take her anywheres. That dear girl is just as pretty as a picture. Why, when she was waiting on people at the church supper, there was a man staying with the Fewkses up the road who said that she ought to go to Hollywood. He said she would have a great future in the movies. I said to Frieda that Mr. Calder might know someone in Hollywood. I said that Mr. Calder knows folks everywhere, and Mr. Sidney said you knew some folks in Hollywood."

"What happened about Earle?" I said.

"That poor boy!" Josie said. "He was so happy when Frieda said she would go to the beach with him. First he tried to borrow a dollar from Miss Bella and Miss Bella hadn't any, and Mr. Sidney was gone with the pocketbook, and dear Mrs. Wright couldn't find any money, and all I had was fifteen cents, because the man came for the sewing machine money, and dear Mrs. Wright still owes me for two weeks. He just can't get the money to take Frieda to the beach."

"Tell him to come in," I said.

Earle came into the kitchen, chewing gum. The rhythmic motion of his jaws concealed all emotion. There were pimples on his adolescent face. His figure showed nothing that might connect him with high romance.

"You want to go down to the beach tonight?" I asked.

"Yup," said Earle. "Mrs. Wright, she hasn't paid me. She owes me fourteen dollars."

"Well, here's a dollar," I said.

"Thanks a lot," said Earle, and left us.

"Earle is a nice boy," said Josie, "really a nice clean boy. His father's on the WPA. It makes Earle so sensitive. His teacher says Earle has a great future. The Caraways are such lovely people, and he's so fond of you, Mr. Calder. He says you're a lovely man. It does seem, doesn't it, that everybody has his troubles?"

"That's right," I said, "everybody has troubles."

"They just expect Frieda and me to do everything," Josie said. "Miss Bella wants Frieda to wash all her underthings. They just expect to be waited on all the time, no matter how many people they have coming, and all the drinking and all the glasses, and they all put cigarette butts in their coffee cups, Mr. Calder. They're so careless that they don't seem to think of anything. If it wasn't for dear Mrs. Wright—if it wasn't for all these dear children of mine—"

"Never mind," I said, "Frieda will get married and be off your hands."

"It was so different when I came here first," said Josie, "when Miss Sarah was alive."

"Not much different," I said.

I leaned back in the kitchen chair and watched the flies buzzing about the sink. The kettle on the stove simmered. Life was going on at Wickford Point, moving slowly in the summer heat, a strange, unworldly life. It seemed to have no end and no beginning. Nothing was ever right and nothing was ever wrong. I did not consider speaking to Cousin Clothilde, because it would have done no good. I had made a definite financial arrangement and had paid her my expenses.

"Mrs. Wright will have some money on the first of the month," I said.

"Dear Mrs. Wright has so many worries," Josie said. "She's worried about Miss Bella. That Mr. Stackton who was down here, and then that Mr. Berg."

"Well, they've gone," I said.

"Dear Mrs. Wright," said Josie, "she keeps fretting about Miss Bella. It does seem too bad what with all her chances. They've all had so many chances."

"Yes," I said, "we've all had a lot of chances."

"Now it does seem to me," said Josie, "that if any of them would do any work—there's lots of things folks could do around here, Mr. Calder. When the armchair in the front room began to get shaky, they could have glued it. I told Mr. Sidney myself that he ought to have got some glue, but they just waited until it broke to pieces, Mr. Calder. And then there's the front door. If someone was handy here, they could have fixed it, and now it's jammed so it won't open, and they just use the side door, Mr. Calder."

"It's the hinge on the front door, isn't it?" I asked. "Where is there a hammer and a screw driver? I'll fix it."

As I spoke, I knew that I was not going to fix it. I was comfortably sure that there would be some reason to prevent it.

"Earle was looking for the screw driver all day yesterday," Josie said, "and the hammer broke last winter, and those dear children scattered all the tools in the chest around the barn the summer before last. There ought to be a handy man on the place, Mr. Calder. It isn't for you to do such things. It's for a handy man." Josie rubbed her hands on her apron and sat down.

"Now I was telling dear Mrs. Wright," she said, "that they're laying off people in the shoe shop. I have a cousin who's a plumber."

"He couldn't fix the door," I said.

"He could try," said Josie. "He's the nicest man when he isn't drinking, Mr. Calder. He has lots of tools in his automobile. Now I think if you gave him a dollar he could come down and fix the door, and the toilet too—but dear Mrs. Wright, she says it isn't necessary."

I pushed back my chair from the kitchen table and walked to the window over the sink.

"Earle," I called. The gentle sound of the lawn mower ceased.

"Look in the back of my car," I said, "and get me a screw driver and a hammer and meet me by the front door."

"But you might make it worse, Mr. Calder," Josie said.

I did not answer. I already had a premonition that I would make it worse.

Outside, the heat from a blue summer sky had been partially absorbed by the elms and the shrubbery, but the shade did not alleviate this heat; it simply changed its quality into a heavy greenish warmth of vegetable exhalation. The robins were chirping drowsily in the trees and the echo of the lawn mower still seemed to linger in that warm vacancy.

Earle appeared with the hammer and the screw driver, and it came over me that none of us had been taught to use our hands at Wickford Point. None of us were good at driving nails and we were rather proud of it.

"It's hot, ain't it?" Earle said.

"Yes," I said, "it is hot. Now, what's the matter with this door?"

"It just don't open," Earle said. "It seems like it's sort of sagged down."

The paint was peeling from the panels of the heavy front door. Trumpet vines were twined over it, and bees were buzzing dully. I lifted the latch and pushed against it, but it did not move. I examined the heavy hand-beaten hinges which were deeply encrusted with paint. It seemed necessary to get the door off the hinges, but there seemed no proper way to do it, and no way to begin.

"Something must have give somewhere, don't you think?" Earle said.

I jammed the screw driver tentatively at the paint above the hinges.

"Those ain't screwed on," Earle said. "It looks like they're riveted. A screw driver won't do any good, Mr. Calder."

I threw my weight against the door and it gave.

"There isn't anything wrong with it," I said. "Something's stuck in it." And I was right. I walked through the side door and into the front entry. There was a mass of paper wedged into the jamb near the threshold. By working the door back and forth, Earle and I scraped the paper out, and then the door opened and shut easily enough.

"Funny someone shouldn't have noticed that," said Earle. "Looks like a letter, don't it? Someone must have dropped it."

"You can put the tools back in my car now," I said.

When Earle went away I stood in the entry smoothing the paper in my hand. It had been crushed so that it was almost indecipherable. Judging from the few words I could read, it had belonged to Bella, and Bella appeared just as I was reading it. She was dressed in slacks, a striped jersey, and sandals, and she was yawning. She had not bothered to brush her short black hair or to put on lipstick, and she looked pale and sleepy.

"What are you doing, darling?" Bella said.

"I've been fixing the door," I said. "One of your letters got jammed in it."

"What letter?" Bella asked.

"It looks like a letter from your friend Berg," I said.

"You can give it to me," said Bella, and she snatched it out of my hand.

"Every time you walk across the room you drop something," I said. "If it isn't a letter it's a compact, and if it isn't a compact it's a dollar bill, and if it isn't a dollar bill it's a ring."

"I'm looking for a cigarette," said Bella. "Haven't you a cigarette?"

"No," I said, "I gave them to your mother."

"She's finished them all," said Bella. "I was in her room this morning, and then I went into Sid's."

"He's not smoking," I said. "His stomach's troubling him."

"I know," said Bella. "It goes in cycles. First it's his feet, and then it's his stomach. I didn't go there to get cigarettes. I looked through his pockets. He's used up all the money. I'd have looked through yours, but you always get up too early. Somebody's got to go down to the bank. Are you going downtown?"

"I don't know what I'm going to do," I said, "but anyway I fixed the door."

"I suppose you're going to do something," said Bella. "You always do something. I suppose you're going to read. I've got to get away from this, darling. It's getting on my nerves. Are you going away anywhere?"

I had never liked to discuss my plans with any of my relatives. It always provoked argument when any of us announced too definitely what we were going to do. It was easier to move quietly and suddenly.

"What makes you think I'm going anywhere?" I asked.

"Your bag was out in your room," Bella said. "The door was open and I saw it when I came downstairs."

"Well," I said, "I'm going to New York tonight."

"Why, darling," said Bella, "why should you be going to New York?"

"Business," I said. "George Stanhope wants to see me about that story I'm finishing. They want some changes."

"Oh," said Bella, "is that all?"

"Yes," I said, "of course that's all."

Bella put her head to one side in a shrewd and pretty way.

"It couldn't be that Pat Leighton has been calling you again?" she said. "I wouldn't like to have to pay her telephone bill."

"Listen, honey bee—" I began, but I did not have a chance to finish.

The telephone in the small parlor rang. Bella's face brightened. That sound from an outer world seemed to go through her like a healing electric shock. Small bright lights appeared in her violet eyes. The lazy droop left her lips. The ring of the telephone made her alert and charming. She was Bella Brill again, that amusing gay girl who was different, one of those remarkable talented Brills. She was the Bella Brill who could be the life of the party. Her sandals clattered as she darted out into the entry.

"I'll answer it," she said.

I myself could feel the stimulating effect of that ugly tinkling bell. It was not ringing with the mechanical pulse beats of a city telephone but with the long vicious rings translated by the frustrated finger of some girl at the local switchboard. It was a summons from the saner, outer world that was too busy to permit the overdevelopment of personal eccentricity. Over the lines the world was calling Wickford Point—the world which had exploited me in the journalistic trade, the world which had pushed me into France and had blown me out of the front-line trenches and had rubbed my nose in London, Paris and Berlin, and in Beirut and Peking. The same world was calling which had nearly cleaned me out in the crash of '29 and which was now taxing my earnings to give me a more abundant life. Everything you learned in it turned out to be wrong. It was as baffling and as fascinating as when I had seen it first.

Bella, skipping to the telephone, was arranging her exterior to meet it. She was now the intellectual, epigrammatic Bella Brill, the granddaughter of old John Brill, the homespun sage and poet of transcendentalist New England. I myself was changing, because the call might be for me. I was casting aside the minutiae of Wickford Point; I was becoming Jim Calder, who knew his way around.... It was an out-of-town call, judging from the insistence of the bell. It might be my agent in New York to converse about that story. It might be someone else asking me somewhere.

The wooden shutters of the small parlor were still drawn, making the small square room brown and dusky. I had an impression of the whatnot in the corner with the sea shells on it, of the braided rug on the green pine floor, of my great-grandfather's portrait, and of my great-grandmother's portrait over the coal grate, and of the Hogarth print which someone had found in the attic, and of the water color of the river which Cousin Clothilde's mother had done after she came back from Brook Farm, and of the broken Chippendale chair, and of the whole one. I was aware of all these things without really seeing them, just as I was sometimes aware of their presence in the dark. Bella was picking the telephone off the little table and was slouching down into the nearest Windsor chair.

"Hello," Bella was saying, "hello."

Her voice was no longer careless—it had a modulated allure; it gave a gay and provocative invitation; it told of a girl who was expecting something nice and was ready to try anything once. It was the voice which had taken away at least two of her sister Mary's boy friends.

"Hello," Bella said, and then something made her tone grow hard and her thin shoulders stiffen beneath her striped jersey.

"What are you doing? What do you want? Excuse me." She was being elaborately polite. "But I do sometimes answer the telephone. It's my house as much as his. Yes, he's right here in the room. For heaven's sake stop being formal!"

Bella set down the receiver and got out of the Windsor chair. Her lips were drawn into a thin grimace which was more of a grin than a smile. Those bony shoulders of hers, her whole delicate body, were stiff and taut.

"It's Joe," she said. "He wants to speak to you."

"All right," I said. "That's what you get for running to the telephone."

The grimace about Bella's lips changed to a Mona Lisa smile, an expression with which I was familiar. It was a look of hauteur. She was no longer a play girl, but an aristocrat.

"You might tell Joe that he needn't call up here," she said. "There's such a thing as a sense of decency, when people are divorced."

"He didn't want you," I said, "he wanted me."

"Oh," said Bella, "you think so, do you? You might at least be loyal to your own family."

"Go out and get your coffee," I said. "He can call me up any time he wants."

"It's what I might expect from you," said Bella, "and you're not such a saint either. I know plenty about you. How would you like it if Pat—"

"Shut up," I said.

Bella laughed, a thin, provoking laugh.

"Everybody knows," she began, and stopped. I turned away toward the telephone and I could hear her running out of the room. I could hear her footsteps on the stairs in cautious haste. Bella would be going to the extension in the upper hall.

"Hello," I said, "hello, Joe."

Joe's voice was loud and amused.

"Hello, Jim," said Joe. "What the hell are you doing in that lunatic asylum? Are you in the psychopathic ward?"

I was pleased with his question because Bella was undoubtedly listening by that time. In fact I had already heard the receiver being gently lifted off the hook.

"I'm taking a rest," I said.

"Oh," said Joe. "Just sitting on your fanny, thinking? Is Sid there? Is he thinking too? You haven't any right to think. You're not a Brill."

Joe was bitter. I wished that he would not be so bitter, but I did not blame him much.

"Where are you, Joe?" I asked. I hoped he wasn't far away. It did me good, as it always did, to hear his voice. He said he was in Boston on his way to Vermont. He was going to speak at the Hilsop Literary Conference. He didn't know why he was going but his publishers had fixed it. Sam Maxwell had asked him as a personal favor. Sam was in charge of part of the program. Everything was going fine. They had sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies of his new novel, not counting the Book-of-the-Month Club. He couldn't very well go back on Sam. It was hot as hell in Boston and he was stopping at the Crofton. Sam was paying the expenses. They had given him a room full of fake Italian furniture with a Renaissance fireplace that looked like a funnel. He had been on the wagon for two months and he was going to stop right now. Why didn't I come down and we could have dinner? I told him that I would. Then he asked how Bella was, and I told him she was fine and something made him laugh.

When I set down the telephone I had a feeling that I had been away, although I could not define where I had been, but at any rate it was a long way from Wickford Point. Joe had never understood the place, or if he had he was not tied up with it. He was as sensitive as I was, probably more sensitive, but there were no cobwebs of the past about him.

By the time I had walked from the parlor to the dining room, Sid had come down to breakfast. He was sitting hunched over the table in his shirt sleeves, stirring his coffee very carefully, watching the eddies that followed his spoon. Occasionally he would lift it up and allow drops to fall from it very gradually, one by one, back into the cup. I knew what he was doing; it was an exercise which he had contrived to test the steadiness of his hand. He had prided himself on his manual dexterity from the time he had decided to be a chemist, some years before, and now he was in the land of make-believe, thinking of someone like Alexis Carrel. He had not yet tied his necktie and the two ends dangled dreamily over the front of his white shirt.

"Good morning, Jim," said Sid. His voice was resonant, almost pontifical, a mannerism which he had developed lately. "Have you ever noticed the varying surface tension of coffee?" It made an erudite and interesting remark. Sid was always interesting.

"Did you ever think," said Sid, "that it would be quite possible to tell whether coffee is properly boiled or not simply by watching it drip from a spoon? It would not be necessary to taste it. I think this coffee has been boiled too long."

"It's been on the back of the stove for four hours," I said.

"I can tell it," agreed Sid, "by watching it drop from the spoon."

I sat down. That Confucian contemplation of Sid's was a part of Wickford Point, where almost any motion became significant.

"How's your stomach?" I asked.

Sid's face brightened.

"I lay in the sun on the beach all day yesterday," he said. "As long as I am perfectly still in the sun there doesn't seem to be any gas. It's only when I try to do some work."

"What are you working on?" I asked.

"I'm trying to gauge weights by touch," Sid said. "I've been trying for the last two weeks, picking up small objects and then checking my guess. I borrowed some of your socks this morning. Josie hasn't got around to the washing. Where's Bella?"

"Upstairs," I said. "Joe called up."

"He didn't call her up, did he?"

"No," I said. "He wanted me to have dinner with him at the Crofton. Bella went upstairs to listen on the extension." Sid bent over his coffee spoon and uttered a single monosyllable.

"Bitch," he said, and then the dining-room door opened. Bella was with us again.

"What's that you said?" asked Bella.

"Never mind," said Sid. Bella sat down and put her elbows on the table and cupped her chin in the palms of her nervous hands.

"You called me a bitch," she said. "Jim's the only one on this place who can call me that." As she turned toward me there was an almost affectionate look in her narrow, violet eyes.

"And now," said Bella, "I'm about through with this. I've sat around long enough seeing you dribble coffee, Sid, and hearing about your bellyaches. You think you're a genius, don't you? Well, all it is is you're just too damned lazy to move. What did you do with that ten dollars you borrowed from Mary?" Sid shrugged his shoulders slightly and looked up from his coffee cup.

"Oh hell," said Bella, "what's the use? I'm going to get out of here. I'm going to spend the night at the Jaeckels'. Jim's driving into Boston. You'll drop me off, won't you, darling?"

"Yes," I said, "I'll drop you off."

"In the ocean," said Sid, "with a stone around your neck."

Bella looked at Sid and looked away.

"Darling," she said to me, "Clothilde wants to see you upstairs." She patted my hand gently. I knew why she called me "darling," because she wanted a ride halfway to town, and then there was probably something about Joe. She would want to ask me all about him.

A hard intentness altered Bella's glance from affection to efficiency, and I followed the direction of those violet eyes, which could change as rapidly as the surface of a hurrying brook. Bella was looking back toward her brother. Sid was holding a folded ten-dollar bill between his first and second fingers.

"So you've still got Mary's ten dollars," Bella said. "It wasn't in your trousers this morning."

"You have a small mind," said Sid. "If you're going to the Jaeckels' you'll need to tip the servants. Take it." Bella's face softened.

"Thanks," she said, "ever so much, Sid darling. Don't you want me to get you some toast? Don't you want anything besides coffee?"

Then the telephone rang again.

"I'll go," said Bella, and she skipped away like a dancer—and she was a pretty dancer.

"Waiting for someone to call her up, isn't she?" said Sid. When she called me I knew she must have been, because I was not her darling any longer.

"That's for you," Bella said. "Why can't you take your own telephone calls? I have to spend all my time here doing things for everybody."

"Who is it?" I asked her.

"For God's sake," said Bella, "do you think I'm your private secretary? I don't know who he is. He's got a pansy voice." At first I could not imagine who it was, and then I knew that it was Allen Southby calling. His voice was crisp and businesslike, indicating that he was having a busy morning.

"Jim," he said, "I want to see you."

"That's fine," I said. "I'd like to see you, Allen."

"I mean right away," said Allen, "I mean tonight. I'm in a sort of jam."

His gay laugh, when I asked what sort, indicated that he was not really in a jam, that he was simply playfully using the vernacular.

"I mean," said Allen, "a purely literary jam."

"Oh," I said, "you couldn't be, Allen."

"It's about that novel, Jim," he said. "It's just that I've come to a point in it where I need someone who can listen. How does it happen that you've been holding out on me?"

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

Allen's answer was playful and very, very friendly, just the gentle chiding of a dear old friend who knows that his own dear old friend is sometimes up to games.

"You never told me," Allen said, "that you had any important New England connection until the other evening. Can you come down tonight?" There was an annoying, breezy implication in his question. He was saying that he knew that I would be flattered to come. He had that egotistical conviction common to some people in the throes of composition, that what he was doing was a matter of such vital importance that anybody would drop anything to be present at the birth of his ideas.

"I can't very well," I said. "I'm seeing Joe Stowe tonight."

"Joe Stowe!" Allen called back. "Why didn't he let me know he was here, I wonder. He always lets me know. Why, I could have put him up for the night. Where's he stopping? You just leave it to me, I'll get in touch with Joe."

Of all the arts I suppose that writing is the one which develops the lowest attributes, in that its very pursuit magnifies all the human failings. It encourages introversion, neurasthenia, insomnia, irritability and all forms of self-indulgence. It encourages a sensitiveness which makes one open to any sort of slight. It begets a type of personal inflation, for it is nearly impossible to continue without the consciousness of a definite gift of genius. It may be that one is misunderstood by editors, perhaps because one is too far advanced to be comprehended by the simple moron mind. It may be that this hidden gift still lies fallow, but there must be an inner conviction of its presence. It is what enables an author to walk airily among his colleagues and to dispense and to receive the bitter little condescensions of the trade. There is a jealousy in the writing profession which is peculiarly its own. Although I knew that I was jealous, I did not like to think that Allen Southby could get under my skin, because, of course, I knew in my own mind that he was my intellectual inferior. I wished to view him with detachment and the fact that he always succeeded in shaking that detachment was peculiarly unsettling.

"Who was it?" Bella asked.

"Allen Southby," I said. "You don't know him."

"He wrote a book, didn't he?"

"Yes," I said, "he wrote a book."

"I remember," said Bella, "it was recommended in the Junior League Magazine. Is he attractive?"

"Just as nice as he can be," I said. "He's living in Cambridge with his sister."

"Oh," said Bella. "Has he got some sort of a complex?"

"What good does it do to try to find out something about everybody?" I asked her. "It only gets you into mischief. Never mind about Southby."

Bella smiled. A dimple deepened in her left cheek and her eyes grew innocently wide.

"You just don't want me to meet him, because you know I'd like him," she said, "and he must have written a really good book because you're jealous. I'm going to read it. Clothilde wants to see you. I'll get Frieda to wash some stockings for me and press some things. Let me know when you're starting out."