She looked up at him with almost a kindly light on her rough, mannish face as she said good-by.
"My poet, don't, don't let them break you on the golden wheel of their happiness!"
Hartley did not enjoy his cup of Golden Tip that afternoon with Cordelia and two voluminously over-dressed young ladies whom she spoke of as "the Slater girls." Their chatter irritated him, and for once there seemed something sickly, unnatural, exotic, about the overheated air of an overfurnished hotel which existed, as he remembered a compatriot of his had exclaimed, "to provide exclusiveness for the masses."
He knew that it, and all it held, stood for those very conditions of life against which he had once rebelled so vigorously. With its glitter and gliding, did it, he asked himself bitterly—after all, did it represent the fulness of life?
"Why are you so quiet to-day?" Cordelia asked him, reprovingly, under her breath. He had noticed of late a certain outward hardening about her at times—she seemed to him like a judge steeling herself for some impending sentence that must be passed.
"It's the ghost of a dead radical rising up against gold-leaf and cut glass," he laughed.
"Oh, yes, you used to be an anarchist, or something like that, didn't you?" she said wearily.
"Not quite that."
"I wanted you to be nice to these two girls. I thought I told you they were my publisher's daughters?"
She noticed his half-sinister smile.