“It is so like Joe!” she muttered. “So very like Joe. And it’s all wrong—all wrong!”
She had thrown herself in her dressing-gown on the sofa in her dressing-room hoping to have half an hour’s doze before dressing to go out to dinner; and she had found the document in the pocket of the luxurious garment of quilted satin and lace which suited her so well that her maid had often lamented the fact that the convenances of modern English Society precluded her being seen within its folds by any one except her mother and her maid.
“It is so like Joe! And it is meant as a commentary upon my friendships. But it is wrong—wrong!” This was her thought as she lay back upon the sofa, until the pillows among which she had thrown herself surged up all about her as though they were billows of the sea.
And then, instead of going asleep, she began to review three or four of the friendships which she had formed during the past few years—friendships which might easily have degenerated into quite another feeling, if they had not been built on a foundation very different from that which Josephine West had assumed to be the basis of friendship according to Plato.
There was Arthur Galmyn for instance. He and she had become very friendly when they had first met the year before. He had been at Oxford with her brother and had won one of those pernicious prizes which are offered for the best poem of the year—to be more exact, for the poem which is most highly approved of by the adjudicating authorities of the University. She quickly perceived that the effect of winning this prize was, upon young Mr. Galmyn, most disquieting; for he had actually settled down as a poet on the strength of winning it.
Instead of saying, “I have written the poem which has met with the approval of the most highly graduated pedants in the world, therefore I am no poet,” he assumed that pedant was another word for prophet, and that their judgment had conferred immortality upon him and perhaps even upon themselves; for whenever his name came to be spoken in the awful whisper which people employ in mentioning the name of a poet, the names of the adjudicators of the prize would also be mentioned.
He hoped to go through life writing poetry—not the poetry which appears on a Christmas card or imprinted on the little ship which never loses the curl that is originally gained by being enwound about the almond in the after dinner cracker—not even the poetry which is sung, when wedded to melody, by the light of a piano candle,—no; but that form of poetry which is absolutely an unsalable commodity in the public market—unless it was of that high quality which appeared over the signature of Alençon Hope to which Amber had frequently called the inattention of her father.
It was just when he was in this critical position that he came under the influence of Amber Severn. They had become ostentatiously Platonic friends. To be sure he had, after their second meeting, addressed to her a sonnet written in exquisite accordance with the true Petrarchian model, embodying a fervent hope in the last line of the sextett—the two quatrains (each ending with a semicolon) had been mainly descriptive—but she had explained to him that she would take a lenient view of this action on his part, if he would promise to do his best to resist in the future the inspiration which had forced him into it.
He had promised her all that she asked; but he gave her to understand that he did so only through fear of alienation from her.=
“I shrink from life from Amber alienate,"=