Things that once would have brought him happiness failed to stir him. A boom was being worked for him. He was on the crest of a wave. Interviewers were continually calling to get personal stories. Articles appeared in which he confided to the public: “How I Became Famous at Twenty-three,” “Why I Came to America,” “What I Think of New York,” “Why I Distrust Co-education.” There seemed to be no subject, however trivial, upon which his views were not of value to the hundred million inhabitants of America. He was continually finding his face in the papers. He sprang into an unexpected demand both as writer and artist.
The fun he derived from this fluster was in imagining the added worth it would give him in her eyes. He liked to think of her as dashing up to news-stands and showering on him the enthusiasm he had seen her shower on Fluffy. Success left him the more humble in proportion as it failed to rouse her comment. If success couldn’t make her proud of him, there must be some weakness in his character. He searched her letters for any hint that would betray her knowledge of what was happening. Perhaps her very omissions were a sign that she was feeling more than she expressed. At last he wrote and told her. She replied inadequately, “How very nice for you!” His hope had been that she would have included herself as a sharer in his good fortune.
Though he sat for long hours at a stretch, he accomplished laborious results. His attention refused to concentrate. He was always thinking of her: the men who might be with her in his absence; the things she had said and done; the things he had said to her, and which might have been said better; her tricks of gesture and shades of intonation. Her very faults endeared themselves in retrospect He coveted the least happy of the hours he had spent in her company.
For the first day he was consoled by the sight of her tin-type photograph on the desk before him. He glanced at it between sentences and felt that she was near him. But soon he made a sad discovery: it was fast fading. As the days went by he exposed it to the light more and more grudgingly. He had the superstitious fear that, if it was quite dark before she returned, his hope of winning her would be ended.
He lived for the arrival of her letters. His anxiety was a repetition of what he had suffered after her departure from London. He left orders with the hotel-clerk to have them sent up to his room at once. Every time a knock sounded on his door he became breathless.
They came thick and fast, funny little letters dashed off at top-speed in a round girlish handwriting and made to look longer than they were by being sprawled out over many pages. They were full of broken phrases like her speech, with dashes and dots for which he might substitute whatever tenderness his necessity demanded. Usually they began “Dear Miester Deek” and ended “Yours sincerely, Desire.” Once, in a glorious burst of expansiveness, she signed herself “Affectionately, Desire,” and scratched it out. He watched for the error to occur again; it was never repeated. They were the kind of letters that it was perfectly safe to leave lying about; his replies emphatically were not. He marveled at her unvarying discretion.
She had a knack of reproducing the atmosphere of her environment. It was a gay, pulsating world in which she lived. Like Flora, flowers and the singing of birds sprang up where she passed. He contrasted with hers the world he had to offer; it seemed a dull place. She had the keys to Arcady. How false had been his chivalrous dream that a fate hung over her from which she must be rescued!
His lover’s eye detected a wealth of cleverness in her correspondence. He sincerely believed that she was more gifted as a writer than himself. Her letters were full of descriptions of Fluffy in her part, thumb-nail sketches of the other members of the cast and accounts of the momentously personal adventures of a theatrical company on tour. She had a trick of humor that made her intimate in an adjective, and made him laugh. She also had a trick of allotting to him prejudices. “You’d call our leading man a very bad character, but I like him: I think one needs to have faults to be truly charitable. I’d ask you to join us, but—— You wouldn’t get on with theatrical people; you rather—I know, so you needn’t deny it—you rather despise them. I think they’re the jolliest crowd. We dance every night when the show is ended and have late suppers, and—you can guess.”
It was after receiving this that he made up his mind, in preparation for her return, to learn the latest dances. He wondered where she could have gathered the impression that he was puritanical.
But there were other letters in which she joined his future with hers. “Perhaps you’ll write a great play one day, and allow me to be your leading lady.”