"But that's the trouble with genius in our age," interrupted Henry Slater, who declared himself to be a publisher and therefore to know whereof he spoke; "it has to be picked green, like watermelons, so as not to spoil on the market."
"Still, I don't believe you're spoiled yet, Mr. Hartley. That's why I believe I'm going to like you," Miss Short added, with even more disconcerting candor. "And that's why I'm going to take you off and give you some good advice." There was a murmur of simulated jealousy.
"The first of which should be a word or two about wearing the hair longer," said a tired-looking young man with a Turkish cigarette.
"Right enough, Wheelock," said the publisher. "Heaven has given the snake his rattles, and the poet his hair. So that when we hear the one, Miss Short, and see the other, we all know what to do!"
"And you might drop a hint about the Mills House often being the avenue to the Hall of Fame." It was Clive Hodge, the dramatist, speaking in his startlingly thin and girlish voice.
"And why not a word about sneaking back to London and landing on us again in velvet and ruffles and a pre-Raphaelite get-up—with a hint to the reporters beforehand?"
"And a warning, a sorrowful warning, Miss Short, to cultivate the camel-like capacity for hoofing the Desert of Dreams on, say, three square meals a week."
Miss Short turned and looked at them scornfully.
"All acidulated nonsense, my dears—and there are too many little home-made Aristophaneses running around America already."
Then she turned back, good-naturedly, to Hartley, who had been puzzled just how to take it all. It was, in a way, the first time he had seen Celebrity on parade. There was a self-consciousness and a somewhat bewildering flashiness about it that he had not counted on. He was most eager to appear among them anything but ponderous, yet he felt some insurmountable paling of prejudice to be shutting him out from them.