The two men were spending the hour after dinner in Fenton’s bachelor-apartments. They had fallen into the way of dining together whenever they were both free to do so; and their friendship, having withstood the failure of Fenton’s effort to make the young man an economic radical, had grown warmer as the weeks went by. In several ways Fenton had derived considerable benefit from his close intercourse with Stoughton. It had been remarked in the city room of the Trumpet that Fenton had given up drinking cocktails, and that he had grown particular about his attire. He no longer allowed his hair and beard to show signs of neglect; and the reporters for the paper had said to each other that the assistant editor did not seem to be quite as sarcastic and testy as he had been in former times. But if any one had told Fenton that a youth not long out of college, and of a mental make-up that was dazzling rather than convincing, had been the active cause in begetting certain reforms in his habits of life, the cynical and time-scarred journalist would have considered his informant insane. The strongest men are moulded and remoulded by their friends, but they are seldom willing to acknowledge the fact.
After Richard’s last argument, Fenton had puffed his cigar in silence for a time. But he was not thinking of what his companion had just said. He had grown convinced from several remarks, dropped inadvertently by his friend, that the young man had become very much interested in Mrs. Percy-Bartlett. It was not within the possibilities of their existing friendship for him to question Richard very closely on this point; but he was extremely anxious to know the exact truth of the matter. If he went to the musicale, he thought, he could see for himself just how the affair stood, and would be the better able to guide his own steps in the premises. It had been his passion, when a young man, for a certain married woman, that had ruined John Fenton. He had a well-grounded horror, therefore, of seeing Richard Stoughton wrecking himself on the same rock that had caused his own downfall.
“You have stated your arguments very cleverly, Richard,” he had said, after a time. “You sacrificed yourself on the altar of my books. I will reciprocate by throwing myself under the juggernaut of your musicale. But, understand me, you will be disappointed in the result. Society has no allurements for me. I touched it at all points years ago, when I had much more enthusiasm than I have now; and, I tell you, there is nothing in it as a permanent amusement for a man of sense. What is a gathering of people of fashion, at its best? Nothing more than a dress-parade of more or less well-groomed men and women who revenge themselves for boring each other in public by destroying each other’s characters in private.”
“If you ever have time,” suggested Richard, smiling, “you should write a novel, John. You have a way of scolding the universe with a kind of epigrammatic fervor that might prove popular.”
“You flatter me, Richard, by the implied conviction that I have not yet been flippant enough to produce a work of fiction. I don’t want you to idealize me; so I might as well confess, that, years ago, when I was about your age, I did write a novel.” Fenton looked at Richard with an expression on his face that would have fitted the confession of a crime. Then he stepped to a closet, and, after rumaging around for a while, brought forth a dust-covered roll of manuscript.
“This,” he said, “is one of the little gravestones in my very large cemetery of dead hopes and dreams.”
He brushed the dust off of the roll with almost reverent hand.
“I haven’t looked at this thing for years, Richard. I’d almost forgotten about it, until you made that remark about my writing a novel. I have a sort of indistinct idea that, in the storehouse of your ambitions, you have high literary aspirations, more or less concealed from view. If you have, let this, my boy, be a warning to you not to waste your time on a novel.”
Richard had been looking through the manuscript with an unaffected show of interest.
“You call it ‘Ephemeræ,’” he remarked. “It is a taking title.”