Put a touch of spring in the air, the thought of a woman in the heart, and keep from poetry if you can.—"The Silver Poppy."
For the second time Cordelia Vaughan had left Hartley stunned and amazed. Twice since he had first met her he looked up in bewilderment and found it necessary to readjust his estimate of her. This second readjustment, though, was somewhat different from the first.
It was not until he had left her (receiving her homage like the acknowledged and imperious young queen she was) that once more back in his dingy little lodging, stiflingly squalid after the richness of the Spauldings' crowded drawing-room, he had untied the blue silk ribbon that so daintily bound the manuscript of her second book. To lose himself in it would be a relief. He was glad to slip away into the unreal world which her hand had opened up to him.
Cordelia had named her story The Unwise Virgins. With the open manuscript once before him, Hartley read it through, from start to finish. And it was from that reading he emerged stunned and amazed.
The Unwise Virgins was a failure, a glittering but disheartening failure. Of that there could be no two opinions. The streets of the city had not been so kind to Cordelia Vaughan as had the open hills of Kentucky. Her second book had none of the power and movement of The Silver Poppy, none of those whimsical tendernesses and quaint touches of humor and pathos that had half muffled the razor edge of her earlier satiric touch.
From the first Hartley had been led to regard Cordelia as a woman without an affluent sense of humor. Then, after reading The Silver Poppy, he had wondered if she had not drained off, as it were, her vanished reservoirs of mirth; if her mental blitheness had not been lost with the too labored advent of her first-born. He had heard not infrequently of "men of one book." Could it be that Cordelia was a woman of one supreme effort? Or was it her newer life that was so altering and wasting and enervating her?
For, hard as he found it to confess to himself, The Unwise Virgins, as a whole, held neither accomplishment nor hope. In fact, with his child terror of the trite and the commonplace, and racked as he was by his "torture of form," he found in it nothing but energy miserably misspent. It was a heap of glittering particles that ran elusively through the fingers, a labored thing of shreds and patches. Its simulation of power was almost pedantry, its affectation of finesse was time and time again flaccid idling with words half understood.
Each time the wings of his admiration were about to unfold, the stroke of some little banality sent him tumbling down to earth again. Yet through the maze of all this energy misdirected he could get glimpses of the substantial enough central idea on which Cordelia had attempted to build. But on it she had built nothing but a misshapen, chaotic thing which tempted him, with his passion for form, to demolish and rebuild after his own fashion. It stood a challenge to him.
Not that Hartley looked on himself as a master workman in this respect. He could not pride himself on either great experience or great accomplishment. But the enthusiasm of the true disciple was in him; a youth of isolation had been building in him those silent fires which smelt experience and mood into art and expression. He had been a desultory yet rapacious reader. Through an erratic and none too studious college course he had fed hungrily on the older literature of his own tongue, and had also mastered the poets of a tongue which he could never force himself to look on as dead. He had come out of these excursions with a sensitized taste and the gift of a sort of literary bletonism, intuitively responding to any sign of the artist beyond the effort. And now, with the touch refined and the hand trained, he, as an artist, stood idle, pounding the anvil of journalism when he might be wielding the chisel of the gold-smith.