"Yes—but who is he?" demanded Joan eagerly.
"Something on the stock exchange. I see him there every day."
"The stock exchange!"
"Yes. Oh, he writes poems and things for the papers, too, I think. Quite a literary guy." He mentioned the name.
It is a name known and remembered wherever there are moonrises and fireflies, smoke against the sunset, apple-trees in bloom—all the everyday lovely things people forget to see unless there are poets to remind them...
It gave Joan quite a new zest in living to realize that at any moment, even at Country Clubs, it is possible to run across a poet.
CHAPTER IX
Richard Darcy was accepting the change that had come into his life much as he had accepted others of a less fortunate trend. He had become at last what Nature had always intended him to be, one of the world's chosen, a rich man—or, what was even better because less troublesome, the husband of a rich woman. He was also once more an honored citizen of his native commonwealth—where he had not always been entirely an honored citizen, owing to one of the unfortunate mistakes to which youth is liable. There had been some disagreement with an early employer about the right of employees to divert the firm's funds, temporarily of course, to private uses. Only family influence had prevented this misunderstanding from resulting in truly disastrous consequences, which he shuddered to this day to contemplate. But it had prevented; and the early employer was dead (as Richard Darcy had taken pains to ascertain before returning to Louisville), and the few who knew of this painful episode at the time appeared to have forgotten it.
Very good! He was quite willing to forget it himself. It was Richard Darcy's creed that a gentleman takes whatever comes in his stride, without too many backward glances; and his stride was just now adapting itself gracefully to the one-step.