Art is the china of sentiment packed in the sawdust of sense.—"The Silver Poppy."
"How would you like to make two hundred and fifty dollars this afternoon?" asked Cordelia calmly, as she stood before Hartley, comfortably muffled in her new chinchilla hat and coat.
"Oh, don't tempt me," he laughed, as he deferentially enthroned her in that great green-backed library chair, which by perhaps its mere voluminous somberness always seemed to touch her strangely into a new youth.
"But what would you do for it?" she asked teasingly, yet with a tacit seriousness of mind, for she felt that his new manner of life was more and more bringing about the necessity for a larger income.
"Do for it? I should be ashamed to say," he laughingly confessed, wondering at the troubled brow and the cold, judicial sobriety of her eyes.
She handed him a typewritten note, waiting in silence until he had finished reading it, and had looked up at her with an inquiring glance.
The letter was a hastily written request from the editorial office of one of New York's most variedly sensational newspapers, urgently asking for a few hundred words from the author of The Silver Poppy on the Influence of War. The newspaper in question had of late essayed to carry on what had become a somewhat heated controversy as to the relation between war and religion, while its eloquent young editor daily expounded his conviction that in the present corrupt condition of mankind war was not only quite reconcilable with true Christianity, but was actually a remedial agent, tending toward progress and civilization. He conceded that it might be an evil, yet was not evil.
"Now let me explain," broke in Cordelia. "This afternoon I suddenly remembered that you had just the thing they wanted—you brought it up and read it to me the other Sunday after we'd had dinner at the Casino."
He winced at the little irony of accident, yet remembering consolingly that even a Horace had framed his bucolic idyls sipping Falernian in citied ease within a stone's throw from the Palatine, he waited in silence for her to continue.