CHAPTER VII.
Not long after the events last chronicled, the Fearings left New York for the summer, and George was left to his own meditations, to the society of his father and to the stifling heat of the great city. He had seen Constance again more than once before she and her sister had left town, and he had parted from her on the best of terms. To tell the truth, since his sudden exhibition of violent temper, she had liked him even better than before. His genuine anger had to some extent dissipated the cloud of doubt which always seemed to her to hang about his motives. The doubt itself was not gone, for as it had a permanent cause in her own fortune it was of the sort not easily driven away.
As for George himself, he considered himself engaged, of course in a highly conditional way, to marry Miss Constance Fearing. She had repeated, at his urgent solicitation, what she had said when he had first declared himself, to wit, that if she ever loved him she would marry him, and that there was no one whom she at present preferred to him. More than this, he could not obtain from her, and in his calm moments, which were still numerous, he admitted that she was perfectly fair and just in her answer. He, on his part, had declared with great emphasis that, however she might love him, he would not marry her until he was independent of all financial difficulties, and had made himself a name. On the whole, nothing could have seemed more improbable than that the marriage could ever take place. The distance between writing second-rate reviews at ten dollars a column, and being one of the few successful writers of the day is really almost as great as it looks to the merest outsider. Moreover, a friendship of several months’ standing is generally speaking a bad foundation on which to build hopes of love. The very intimacy of intercourse forbids those surprises in which love chiefly delights. Friendly hands have taken the bandage from his eyes, and he has learned to see his way about with remarkable acuteness of perception.
Perhaps the most immediate and perceptible effect of the last few interviews with Constance was to be found in the work he turned out, and in the dissatisfaction it caused in quarters where it had formerly been considered excellent. It was beginning to be too good to serve its end, for the writer was beginning to feel that he could no longer efface his individuality and repress his own opinions as he had formerly done. He exceeded in his articles the prescribed length, he made vicious Latin quotations, and concocted savagely epigrammatic sentences, he inserted sharp remarks about prominent writers, where they were manifestly beside the purpose, besides being palpably unjust, there was a sting in almost every paragraph which did not contain a paradox, and, altogether, he made the literary editors who employed him very nervous.
“It won’t do, Mr. Wood,” one of them said. “The publishers don’t like it. Several have written to me. The paper can’t stand this kind of thing. I suppose the fact is that you are getting too good for this work. Take my advice. Either go back to your old style, or write articles over your own name for the magazines. They like quotations and snap and fine writing—authors and publishers don’t, not a bit.”
“I have tried articles again and again,” George answered. “I cannot get them printed anywhere.”
“Well—you just go ahead and try again. You’ll get on if you stick to it. If you think you can write some of your old kind of notices, here’s a lot of books ready. But seriously, Mr. Wood, if you write any more like the last dozen or so, I can’t take them. I’m sorry, but I really can’t.”
“I’ll have one more shot,” said George, desperately, as he took up the books. He could not afford to lose the wretched pay he got for the work.
He soon saw that other managers of literary departments thought very much as this first specimen did.
“A little more moderation, Mr. Wood,” said a second, who was an elderly æsthetic personage. “I hate violence in all its forms. It is so fatiguing.”