3
The next day, and the next, Felix and Tom talked again about Chicago; but not in the realistic vein Felix would have preferred. Tonight he must go back to town; he had already stayed too long—he was falling into his old habit of day-dreaming about the future.... That chapter had set him off. Gloria had been—well, startled and impressed, to say the least. That chapter was good. Perhaps he was destined to help bring back to English fiction its lost candour, the candour of the Elizabethans and Defoe and Fielding.
But no, he must not think about such things now. He would have no time for writing, for a long while, in Chicago. He would be too much immersed in the struggle for existence. If he were to write novels, he ought to stay in Port Royal. Yes, he might take the civil service examination and get a quiet job in the post-office that would give him time to think and dream and write....
He sprang up. He knew quite well what this meant. Cowardice! If he got into the post-office, he would stay there forever.... He started abruptly toward the house, leaving Tom in the midst of an anecdote of old Chicago days.
He had left the map on Tom’s desk. His novel was in that same desk. If he started reading that novel again, he might decide to stay in Port Royal and finish it. He wondered whether the map or the novel would claim him when he sat down at that desk. Five minutes at that desk might decide his whole future for him....
He went into Tom’s room, went over to the desk—and from a letter lying open beside the pen-tray there flashed up to him his own name, Felix Fay ... with a fringe of words about it.
Those words startled him, and he bent over the letter to make sure that they were really there; he read them, and turned to see the signature—it was that of Madge Alden; and then he sat down in Tom’s chair and read slowly that paragraph of three sentences.
“Is that nasty young man Felix Fay really a friend of yours? I think he’d better leave Port Royal quick. The story of that horrible chapter is all over town and—well, if you knew the things Gloria is saying about him!”
So Gloria had betrayed him to Port Royal.