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Su/\DOWLAND
ance of Jimmie Blake. He knew a still bitterer one on this day of ferreting him forth from his murky obscurity. It was, thought John Paige, very murky, very murky indeed. It was so murky that there came to the fatherly publisher the rueful thought that a great many strong winds and hot suns would have to blow and shine to remove the miasma from the young writer. Whiskey . . and women with fawning lips and arms . . . and sleepless nights . . . asd dreams not fit the name . . . Cheap, tawdry, ruination garnished in faded ribbons and rank" with bad perfume.
Paige told all this to the. young writer, crouched into his chair, meditating detached^ upon interruptions and interferences in general and publishers in particular. Hang it all, he liked John Paige, but didn't the man see
that he was sick, know that Toby's bow was a rite. It
he was sick, bodv and mind was a ,eere7n>y. ^ wa*
j 1 n ta j ja i invested with a dignity all
and soul r Lhdn t he sense its own
the foct that his vitality was all gone, that he was as
bleached out as a bone, that dissipations and light loves and light joys had tarnished him . . . permanently? "What made him mouth so. then, about bright futures, and hopes and brilliant promises and rights to the world, to Letters, to himself? What made him gibber the inanities to a moral corpse?
Anyway, it all resulted in his standing in this breezy, blossomy room, at twilight, birds twittering sleepily outside his window, fragrances drifting in, the pleasant smell of wood fires about, space, dusk . . .
It resulted because he had, at the end of John Paige's diatribe, asked the publisher for some money. The publisher had, at first, refused, then had written him a check for five thousand on the stipulation that he leave the Village, leave New York, go back, as it were, to the soil and there, if he could, find himself again. Find the vital young person who had written "The Thorn."
He had left Jimmie to ponder the matter. In the midst of his pondering Valerie Vincent had come in. She was doing a little statuette of a girl, with a splendid face, a splendid body, but broken wings trailing behind her ... in the dust . . . The statuette, she had told Jimmie, reminded her, somehow, of Eugenie Vardeman, the Southern girl who had written the novel Jimmie had condemned. She had gone on at quite a rate about Eugenie. She supposed that Jimmie was not listening. He almost never was. And yet she knew that it gave him some sort of a vicarious sense of companionship to have her talk to him. He
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