"That's it. Don't you give in. You're twenty. Don't you give in. I was scared when you left your work——"
"Oh, that. I couldn't stay. I don't know. Restless."
"That's all right," said Aunt Charlotte, satisfied. "Restless is all right. Restless is better than resigned."
Of Jesse Dick's poems, two made a little furore. The reviewers all had a line or two or three about his having been one of the most promising of the younger poets of the virile school. They said his was American poetry, full of crude power. One poem—the one called "Chemin des Dames"—they even learned in the schools, mispronouncing its title horribly, of course. They took it seriously, solemnly. Charley alone knew that it had been written in satire and derision. It was his protest against all the poems about scarlet poppies and Flanders fields. Taken seriously, it was indeed a lovely lyric thing. Taken as Charley knew he had meant it, it was scathing, terrible.
People thought the one called "Death" was a little too bitter. Good—but bitter, don't you think? That part beginning:
"They said you were majestic, Death.
Majestic! You!
I know you for the foolish clown you are;
A drooling zany, mouth agape and legs asprawl,
A grotesque scarecrow on a barbed wire fence.