He had quite forgotten Mr. Bangs, and the nature of his errand.
Mr. Clive Bangs, having handed the typewritten sheet to the foreman of the composing-room, walked back slowly. He knew very well who his visitor was. Helen’s letter announcing his arrival was in his pocket. “He is,” Helen had written him, “just as crazy as you are, Clive!” But he distrusted Helen’s judgment.... It was one thing to welcome to Chicago one more of the too few sophisticated spirits of the mid-west; it was another to have on his hands some pale, gawky, helpless youth who had been falsely encouraged by country librarians in the notion that he could write! What seemed a prodigy out in Iowa might be merely one of the army of unemployed and unemployable here in Chicago. Clive had tried to help these prodigies before; and he knew that a painful addiction to the style of Ruskin, combined with egotism and a total lack of ideas, was no easy malady to cure. He rather flinched from the prospect of taking Helen’s protégé in hand.... But, still—“crazy as you are”—Helen might know what she was talking about.
Stopping in the doorway, Clive looked at his problem in person. He had picked up that book—that H. G. Wells book.... Those were the days just before “Tono-Bungay,” and the name of H. G. Wells was as yet cherished by only a few enthusiasts. Besides, this was the least known of H. G. Wells’ writings, and one who might have heard of Wells as a writer of pseudo-scientific yarns would be puzzled by it. Clive stood for a moment trying to gauge the quality of Felix Fay’s response to the volume in his hand; then he went up to him.
Felix awoke to find Mr. Bangs standing beside him, and looking at him quizzically.
“I see you’re looking at my latest Wells find,” said Mr. Bangs.
“The first English edition! Where did you pick it up?” Felix asked. “In a second-hand store?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Bangs. “Forty cents! At Downer’s.”
Felix laid the book down reverently. “I wonder,” he said, “if they have any other Wells’ things there. There’s one of his books I’ve never been able to come across anywhere—‘The Island of Doctor Moreau.’ Do you know it?”
“I have the only copy I’ve ever seen in Chicago,” said Clive Bangs. “I’ll lend it to you.”
“I wish you would,” Felix said gratefully. “I found ‘The Time Machine’ in an old junk-shop in Port Royal last summer, and that made ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ the only thing of Wells’ I hadn’t read—I suppose you know ‘Kipps’? And ‘Love and Mr. Lewisham’?”