Part 9 (2/2)

Good-night, my darling. May happiness be yours.

XIII

_March 4._ My impressions of that first winter in New York are curiously dim except for the extreme loneliness of my life, which, after the close companions.h.i.+p with my father for so many years, seemed at times almost unbearable. Indeed, I doubt if I could have borne the long hours of solitude and toil but for my occasional glimpses of you. I should think myself fatuous in claiming that you influence me physically,--that I am conscious of a material glow, ecstasy, thrill, call it what you please, when with you,--if I had not once heard Agnes declare that she always felt, when you were in the room, as if she had been drinking champagne; showing that I am not the only one you can thus affect.

My pleasantest recollection is of our long talk in my employer's study; and strangely enough, it was my books which gained it for me. Mr.

Whitely, when I first came into his service, had just endowed a free library in one of the Western cities where some of his oil interests centred, and I hinted to him the purchase of my books as a further gift to his hobby. The suggestion did not meet with his approval,--I fear because there was not the self-advertising in it that there is in a money gift,--but after a week he told me that he might buy the collection to furnish his editorial study. ”I plan,” he said, ”to make my office attractive, and then have informal literary receptions once a week. I shall therefore require some books, and as your library should be marked by breadth and depth of learning, I presume it will serve my purpose.”

”There are quite a number of Eastern ma.n.u.scripts of value,” I told him, ”and few of the books are in languages that can be read by the average New Yorker.”

”That gives the suggestion of scholars.h.i.+p which I wish,” he acknowledged.

We easily came to terms under these circ.u.mstances, and I cannot tell you how happy I was to find myself once more surrounded by my books. As soon as they were in place and the study was handsomely furnished, my employer issued cards; and though he had nothing in common with the literary and artistic set, the mere fact that he controlled the columns of a great paper brought them all flocking to his afternoons. It is a case of mutual cultivation, and I am sick of being told to write puffs of books and pictures. Even foreigners do not seem above this log-rolling, and toady to the editor of the influential journal. And yet we think Johnson mean-spirited for standing at Chesterfield's door! It humiliates me to see writers and artists stooping so low merely to get notices that are worthless in a critical sense, and doubly am I degraded that mine is the pen that aids in this contemptible chicane.

You, Mrs. Blodgett, and Agnes came to one of these afternoons, and made me happy, not alone by your presence, but by an insinuated reproof, which meant, I thought, that you had become enough interested in me to care what I did. You expressed surprise at my being there, and so I explained to you that I had become Mr. Whitely's secretary.

”And is your work congenial?” you asked.

I shrugged my shoulders, and quoted, ”Civilized man cannot live without dining.”

”But you told me you were making a living. Is not a crust with independence and a chance to make a name better than such work?”

”If one is free, yes. But if one must earn money?”

”I had somehow fixed it in my mind that you were _en garcon_. One's fancies are sometimes very ridiculous. Who invented the mot that a woman's intuitions were what she had when she was wrong?”

”Some man, of course,” I laughed. ”And you were right in supposing me a bachelor.”

”How little people really know about one another,” you observed, ”and yet we talk of the realism of life! I believe it is only in fiction that we get it.”

”Napoleon said, 'Take away history and give me a novel: I wish the truth!' Certainly, our present romance writers attempt it.”

”Only to prove that truth is not art.”

”How so?”

”To photograph life in literature is no more art than a reproduction of our street sounds would be music.”

”Painting and sculpture are copying.”

”And the closer the copy, the less the art.”

”Then you would define art as”--

”The vivifying of work with the personality of the workman.”

”That is not very far from Saadi's thought that art is never produced without love.”

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