Ach! just to hear him talk! It was like the realization of a power in life itself to hold her up and carry her to the heights.
“Will you leave this manuscript here, so I can have my secretary type it for you?” he asked as he took her to the door. “I can have it done easily. And I shall write you when I’ll have time for another long talk about your work.”
Only after she had left did she fully realize the wonder of this man’s kindness.
“That’s America,” she whispered. “Where but in America could something so beautiful happen? A crazy, choked-in thing like me and him such a gentleman talking together about art and life like born equals. I poverty, and he plenty; I ignorance, and he knowledge; I from the bottom, and he from the top, and yet he making me feel like we were from always friends.”
A few days later the promised note came. How quick he was with his help, as if she were his only concern! Bare-headed, uncoated, she ran to him, this prince of kindness, repeating over and over again the words of the letter.
Her spirit crashed to the ground when she learned that he had been suddenly called to a conference at Washington. “He would return in a fortnight,” said the model-mannered secretary who answered her feverish questions.
Wait a fortnight? She couldn’t. Why, the contest would be over by that time. Then it struck her, the next best thing—the professor of English. With a typewritten manuscript in her hand, he must listen to her. And just to be admitted to his short-story class for one criticism was all she would ask.
But small a favour as it seemed to her, it was greater than the professor was in a position to grant.
“To concede to your request would establish a precedent that would be at variance with the university regulations,” he vouchsafed.
“University regulations, precedents? What are you talking?” And clutching at his sleeve, hysterically, she pleaded: “Just this once, my life hangs on getting this story perfect, and you can save me by this one criticism.”