"I mean all he wants is ballasting with a little of that business spirit which we call American push."
"Thanks," she murmured. "But tell me about him."
"Well, there isn't much to tell—at least not much that I know."
"But you knew him abroad?"
"Yes, I met him two years ago at Lady Meredith's—those were the Woodstock Merediths of Meredith Hall. I was doing a portrait of Connie Meredith—that's the 'C. M.' of the book—and he used to tramp over from Oxford now and then. His father was Sir Harry Hartley, who was killed in the Dunstable Hunt four or five years ago. Hartley himself was wasting his time about Oxford, unsettled, unsatisfied, impecunious, and unrecognized. As I said, I saw a good deal of him at the Merediths'. He was to have married the girl—it was she who gave me that volume—but she was always delicate. In fact, they had to pack her off to the south of England, and then to Italy. She died at Fiesole. On my way back from the Continent I ran across Hartley again, and asked him why he didn't try America."
"And will he ever do anything—anything worth while, I mean?"
She still held the thin, green volume of verse in her hand, almost contemptuously—suddenly depressed in spirits, she could not fathom why.
"He has already done something worth while."
"What is it?"
"Small things, I mean, but of the right sort."