Part 18 (2/2)

”Yet surely they must need a club, and what one so appropriate as this?”

”It is natural to reason so,” a.s.sented the would-be member. ”But as an actual fact, some of the most prominent men in this city are not members,” and he mentioned three well-known names.

The inference was so unjust that I observed, ”Should you not add, Mr.

Whitely, that they are not members either because they know it is useless to apply, or because they have applied in vain; and that their exclusion, though superficially a small affair, probably means to them, by the implication it carries, one of the keenest mortifications of their lives?”

”You mean that the Philomathean refuses to admit such men as Mr. Whitely named?” you asked incredulously.

I smiled. ”The worldly reputation and the professional reputation of men occasionally differ very greatly, Miss Walton. We do not accept a man here because his name appears often in the newspapers, but because of what the men of his own calling know and think of him.”

”And of course they are always jealous of a man who has surpa.s.sed them,”

contended Mr. Whitely.

”There must be something more against a man than envy of his confreres to exclude him,” I answered. ”My loyalty to the Philomathean, Miss Walton, is due to the influence it exerts in this very matter. Errors are possible, but the intention is that no man shall be of our brotherhood who is not honestly doing something worth the doing, for other reasons than mere money-making. And for that very reason, we are supposed, within these walls, to be friends, whether or not there is acquaintance outside of them. We are the one club in New York which dares to trust its members.h.i.+p list implicitly to that extent.

Charlatanry and dishonesty may succeed with the world, but here they fail. Money will buy much, but the poorest man stands on a par here with the wealthiest.”

”You make me envious of you both,” you sighed, just as Mrs. Blodgett and Agnes joined us.

”What are you envying them?” asked Agnes, as she shook hands with you,--”that they were monopolizing you? How selfish men are!”

”In monopolizing this club?”

”Was that what you envied them?” e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Mrs. Blodgett. ”I for one am glad there's a place to which I can't go, where I can send my husband when I want to be rid of him.” Then she turned to Mr. Whitely, and with her usual directness remarked, ”So they've let you in? Mr. Blodgett told me you would surely be rejected.”

Mr. Whitely reddened and bit his lip, for which he is hardly to be blamed. But he only bowed slightly in reply, leaving the inference in your minds that he was a Philomath. How the man dares so often to--

The striking clock tells me it is later than I thought, and I must stop.

Good-night, dear heart.

XXI

_March 12._ Our talk at the Philomathean and Mr. Whitely's tacit a.s.sumption of members.h.i.+p had their penalty for me,--a penalty which, to reverse the old adage, I first thought an undisguised blessing. When we separated, he asked me to dinner the following evening, to fill in a place unexpectedly left vacant; and as I knew, from a chance allusion, that you were to be there, I accepted a courtesy at his hands.

Although there were several celebrities at the meal, it fell to my lot to sit on your right; my host, who took you down, evidently preferring to have no dangerous rival in your attention. But Mrs. Blodgett, who sat on his other side, engaged him as much as she chose, and thus gave me more of your time than I should otherwise have had. If you knew how happy it made me that, whenever she interrupted his monopoly of you, instead of making a trialogue with them, you never failed to turn to me!

”I have just re-read Mr. Whitely's book,” you remarked, in one of these interruptions, ”and I have been trying to express to him my genuine admiration for it. I thought of it highly when first I read it, last autumn, but on a second reading I have become really an enthusiast.”

I suppose my face must have shown some of the joy your words gave me, for you continued, ”Clearly, you like it too, and are pleased to hear it praised. But then it's notorious that writers are jealous of one another! Tell me what you think of it?”

I tried to keep all bitterness out of my voice as I laughed. ”Think how unprofessional it would be in me to discuss my employer's book: if I praised it, how necessary; if I disparaged it, how disloyal!”

”You are as unsatisfactory as Mr. Whitely,” you complained. ”I can't get him to speak about it, either. He smiles and bows his head to my praise, but not a word can he be made to say. Evidently he has a form of modesty--not stage fright, but book fright--that I never before encountered. Every other author I have met was fatiguingly anxious to talk about his own writings.”

”Remember in our behalf that a book stands very much in the same relation to a writer that a baby does to its mother. We are tolerant of her admiration; be equally lenient to the author's harmless prattle.”

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