Experience in life, however, must, so said Utterly, go only so far, must stop short before a man or woman was bound to obligations which would rob him of his freedom. Only a few great men had been men of family, or, being men of family, had got on with their families. There was Byron, for instance, and there was Shelley, and there were dozens of others on the tip of his tongue.
To the most of this fluent outpouring his dazzled audience made only polite general responses. She knew, thank fortune! a good deal about each of the authors whom he mentioned. Shelley she had read from cover to cover and Byron also, and Charlotte Brontë, of course. But she did not know much about them as human beings, Dr. Scott having an old-fashioned way of requiring a reading of the works of great authors, rather than a knowledge of their lives.
Finally Utterly spoke of the works of Basil Everman. One could almost make up Basil Everman's life from his works, so clearly did they indicate the storm and stress of spirit in which he must constantly have lived.
"I believe I don't know who Basil Everman was," confessed Eleanor, mortified by her own ignorance. "Was he related to Dr. Lister?"
"Of course you don't know!" Utterly leaned back in his chair, his voice sharp with sarcasm. "It is apparently the deliberate intention of this community not only to quench all sparks of divine fire, but to hide their ashes. Basil Everman was the brother of the wife of your college president; he grew up in this town, a person of extraordinary mind; he died. But nobody remembers him or seems to want to remember him. It is an attitude not peculiar to Waltonville; it is characteristic of Keokuk, Ishpeming, and many other communities, bourgeois, intolerable, insane."
When Utterly went at eleven o'clock, Eleanor flew to her mother. She was excited and elated, her wonderful day had sloped to no anticlimax.
"They have taken my story, mother, and I am to have seventy-five dollars!"
"Seventy-five dollars! Land of love!" repeated Mrs. Bent. "Why, Eleanor!" Mrs. Bent's cheeks grew red, then pale.
"Mr. Utterly thinks that I really can amount to something. He thinks we should go to New York, mother, and sometime to Europe. He says one must have many different things to write about, and of course that is true. Are you pleased, mother?"
"Oh, yes!" Mrs. Bent gasped, as though events were happening too fast for her to follow.