50

"I told you so."

stodd silent

Dick pondered. His mother was uneasily fluttering the pages
of the forbidden book.

"Didn't father ever have doubts— like Mr. Closser?"

"Richard! Richard!"

"Then why was he afraid of unchristian books— if he was a
Christian?"

"I didn't say he was afraid. I—"

"Yes you did. And why did he put them up here out of reach,
if he wasn't?"

His mother murmured: "I sometimes think you say things just
to torture me!"

Dick's heart was beating high. "You know I don't. But I
don't understand... Father wanted me to know, and you say..."

"I say your father was wrong... wrong and wicked!"

"Father?" It burst from Dick in a cry. He looked long and
steadily at his mother. "Then that day— he wasn't delirious?"

She dropped the book and broke into tears. But he stood his
ground, hardening with horror. She had deceived him then— his own
mother! "Father did want me to read things— he did!"

She sobbed silently, pressing her black-edged handkerchief
against her eyes. At length she controlled herself and said: "He read
too much— when he was young. Afterward... You see he put the books
out of reach... And the day he died— have you forgotten?"

Dick looked at her doggedly: his heart was wrung, but not as
she had meant to wring it. "He wanted me to read things," he repeated,
as though the words possessed a mystic potency.

His mother laid her hand on his arm. "But if I want you not
to— yet? Won't you promise me to wait till college?"

52

All day he went about in a mood of high expectancy. Uncle Wayne and Aunt Lucy came to luncheon, bringing Hudnut. The latter was now a lank pink-lidded boy who had outgrown Dick; but to Dick he had never seemed so puerile and unimportant. Hudnut went to a Church School near Tryan, returning to Brown Towers every evening. He was never very high in his class, but he never got into trouble, and Uncle Wayne had lately discovered— not without pride— that he always read every line of the Financial Report in the morning paper.

"He has the impudence to give me tips— sets me right about quotations, the young scoundrel," Uncle Wayne affectionately threatened him, while Hudnut, with a modest smile, watched the roast chicken come his way, visibly calculating whether there would be a bit of breast left when it reached him. Dick recalled how, a year or two earlier, Uncle Wayne, who was fond of propounding speculative questions, had asked the two boys what they "meant to be" when they grew up. Hudnut had answered unhesitatingly "a banker", but Dick (deep in Hakluyt) had thought it more striking to say: "An adventurer into unknown places"— though what he really wanted above everything was to drive about the country selling lightning-rods...

Now all that seemed inexpressibly remote, and when Uncle Wayne said: "That boy'll be a cotton-broker one of these days, he tells me," Dick smiled at the thought of the books upstairs. A philosopher and man of science, turning the magic keys of scholarship in the golden gates of the Unknown— that seemed to him the only thing worth being. And he pitied Hudnut for not knowing it.

That night in his room he tucked himself into bed, screened the light so that his mother shouldn't see it under the door, and plunged into "The Origin of Species".

It was perhaps because he was not accustomed to midnight

vigils that the first pages of the great work seemed so disappointingly
dull. He had flown through Tylor with an ease and understanding that
gave him a gratifying sense of superiority— since he knew that boys of
his age didn't commonly care for that kind of book. But here he was in
a denser element. There was nothing to rouse curiosity or stimulate the
fancy in this close analysis of minute differences between certain kinds
of plants and animals. He tried to stiffen his languid attention and
pushed on, but the sober serried phrases continued to succeed each other
from page to page, and when he had reached a paragraph beginning:

"Indefinite variability is a much more common result of changed condi-
tions than definite variability, and has probably played a more important part in the formation of our domestic races," the book dropped from
his hand, and irresistibly there pressed upon his drowsy eyes the vision
of the sun-gilt snow he had tramped through that morning, and of hemlock-
tops incised upon the blue. He slipped down deliciously under the warm
bed-clothes; then, ashamed to yield to the inclination he raised himself
on his clean and opened the other book.

"Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth Month midnight,
Over the sterile sands...."

Dick started upright and propped the book against his knees, cold and
sleepiness swept away in the amazement of this new note.

"Soothe! soothe! soothe!
Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
And again another behind embracing
and lapping, every one close,
But my love soothes not me, not me..."

Never had words shaken out such wild lights, beat on him in such large
unmeasured waves. It was the swing of the sea itself, the sea of the
poem, tirelessly tossing, and he the child, awed, melted, trembling,
crying out "Oh, if I am to have so much, let me have more!" and feeling
all over him (as if his veins were ears) the deep mysterious answer,

Again the dazzling spray was in his eyes. Poetry he knew it
was— had known more and more distinctly as he read; but theatre—!
And who was better able to pronounce on such a point than Inez Clay?

"I mean to tell Abe Garbish so—" Miss Clay spoke the name of
the dread impresario as familiarly as if he were in her pay instead of
her being in his. "I mean to tell him I'm going to do Ireen!"

"I-re-ne," a low voice fluttered in her ear; and the actress
looked down with her large smile at the thin eager girl who had come to
the studio in her train.

"I-what?" As if I hadn't had a friend for years called Ireen
Stickles!"

"Yes—but in the play..."

"Mercy! Here's a young lady who knows more about the stage
than I do! Mr. Thaxter, my friend Miss Lansing says I ought to call
your heroine Ireeny."

She gave the girl a good-natured push toward the middle of the
circle, while Cleaver, Lorry Marsh and the other young men waited laugh-
ingly for Richard's answer. But he did not see Miss Lansing's protest-
ing face, or hear her faint murmur— "Oh, I only meant in Greek he
was benumbed by the discovery that his hoped-for interpreter, as to
whose erudition he had no illusions, but on whose artistic sensibility
his very life depended—that the actress to whose lips his verse was
to be entrusted had heard him read aloud the four acts of his play,
charged with every shade of rhythmical significance which the subtlest
gradations of emphasis could convey, without noticing whether the hero-
ine's name had two syllables or three! The towering future seemed to
crumble at his feet and he dared not turn and face the eyes around him.

"Well, it's Greek to me, anyhow!" Miss Clay laughed; and sad-
ately mounting to the platform, tossing aside her feathered hat and run-

the actress insisted; but Miss Lansin, slipping her shabbily gloved
hand through Levick's arm, replied: "No, thanks, Mr. Levick's going to
walk down to the office with me. We've got a lot to talk about."

Dick was relieved when Levick had vanished in her wake: the
episode cast an absurdly big shadow on his triumph.

Rollins, who was not always perceiving, saw his friend's per-
turbation and said, when they were cooped up:
"Levick will be fright-
fully cut up. He was keen to hear you, I know—but the fact is he's
no good till after dark. He writes all night, and spends half the day
at the 'Listener' office. You must let him have the manuscript some
day."

Dick gave an ironic laugh: he began to be aware that his
nerves were twitching. "Oh, he'll see it at the Liberty, I hope!"

Rollins's wide face lit up. "By George, so he will— I'll
back my last dollar on that!"

"Miss Clay has a good deal of influence, I suppose?"

"Oh, she's his biggest star, just now. It was rather lucky,
getting her here today."

"It was the kind of luck you're always contriving for your
friends," Dick said, giving his host's arm a friendly shake.

"Oh, by George—" Rollins repeated, <u>inarticulately</u>. To hide
the dissatisfaction he felt in having constituted his happy emotion, at his next share in the afternoon's success he
turned aside and began, with a random hand, to put to rights his disordered "properties". Dick, lounging in the window-seat, watched him moving about, shaking up Bagdad cushions, straightening Spanish chasubles, pulling up tulips that had slipped down too far into their long-necked vase. The heavy Rollins had a hand as light as a woman's, and a feminine abhorrence of any solution of harmony in his surroundings.

"Oh, I say— this must be Rose Lansin's purse. She and

SAINTE-CLAIRE DU CHATEAU
HYÈRES (VAR)

TÉL: 2-29

12 Janvier 1927

Cher Monsieur,

Madame Wharton me charge de vous retourner votre liste de plantes. Avant de faire les commandes elle voudrait savoir s'il n'y a pas des plantes que l'on pourrait commander en France, à qualité égale, elles sont tellement chères en Angleterre,

Naturellement, Madame Wharton ne veut pas faire une économie pour une qualité inférieure, mais dans le cas de plantes que vous croyez aussi bien en France qu'en Angleterre, vous pourriez marquer