"Oh, my poet, my poet, what have they been doing to you?"
It was Miss Short who spoke, looking up at Hartley with surprised and honestly reproving eyes. They had met by accident on upper Broadway, as he was on his way to the tea-room of a Fifth Avenue hotel. Both her tone and manner nettled him.
"Am I so changed?" And he laughed uneasily.
"Why, yes, my poor lost hero, and you're getting fat—no, not exactly fat, but prosperous looking. But a fat poet—it is awful! It sounds worse than a Hercules with French heels. It's as incongruous as an angel eating corn-mush. And who wants a fat poet? His corpulency would always be hinting to you that he was too trimly built, too well ballasted, to be in danger. He's too contented to be interesting. Who's going to thrill with anxiety over a mud-scow swinging in three feet of oily water?"
"Thank you," said Hartley coldly.
"But seriously, you haven't given up the—the open sea?" Miss Short asked him in a softer voice. This grandiloquence of metaphor wearied him.
"Yes, I think I have. It's all very fine out there, but it doesn't pay for the wear and tear on the hawsers. And then there's one's bread and butter; and in New York they can give you so many nice jams to go with it."
"I knew it, I knew it! I never saw a boy come to this city yet who didn't have the rose-tint taken out of his dreams about the same time the rose-tint was taken out of his cheeks. I said your accent wouldn't be as broad when you'd finished with us—nor your views, either."
"No man can live by verse alone."
"It's not that; it's what the verse and all that stands for. You know what The Silver Poppy says, 'A song in the heart is worth two in the book.'"