That led to a long, rambling discussion about the American literary atmosphere. Nothing that I could say would make him relent from his emphatic assertion that it is a spinster atmosphere, an atmosphere in which you can’t say all sorts of things and where all sorts of things have to be specially phrased. “And she can’t stand young things and crude things——”
“America!” said Wilkins.
“The America I mean. The sort of America that ought to supply young new writers with caresses and—nourishment.…Instead of which you get the Nation…. That bleak acidity, that refined appeal to take the child away.”
“But they don’t produce new young writers!” said Wilkins.
“But they do!” said Boon. “And they strangle them!”
It was extraordinary what a power metaphors and fancies had upon Boon. Only those who knew him intimately can understand how necessary Miss Bathwick was to him. He would touch a metaphor and then return and sip it, and then sip and drink and swill until it had intoxicated him hopelessly.
“America,” said Boon, “can produce such a supreme writer as Stephen Crane—the best writer of English for the last half-century—or Mary Austin, who used to write—— What other woman could touch her? But America won’t own such children. It’s amazing. It’s a case of concealment of birth. She exposes them. Whether it’s Shame—or a Chinese trick…. She’ll sit never knowing she’s had a Stephen Crane, adoring the European reputation, the florid mental gestures of a Conrad. You see, she can tell Conrad ‘writes.’ It shows. And she’ll let Mary Austin die of neglect, while she worships the ‘art’ of Mary Ward. It’s like turning from the feet of a goddess to a pair of goloshes. She firmly believes that old quack Bergson is a bigger man than her own unapproachable William James…. She’s incredible. I tell you it’s only conceivable on one supposition…. I’d never thought before about these disgraceful sidelights on Miss Dove’s career….
“We English do make foundlings of some of her little victims, anyhow…. But why hasn’t she any natural instinct in the matter?
“Now, if one represented that peculiar Bostonian intellectual gentility, the Nation kind of thing, as a very wicked, sour lady’s-maid with a tremendous influence over the Spinster’s conduct….”
His mind was running on.