Yet I was sure that I was writing better than ever before.
Simonds, of the Coming Nation, and the editor of the Kansas City Star were about the only editors who now took my work. I inferred rightly that my notoriety was what was tabooing me. I determined to run up to New York and find out for myself if this was true!
As I rode north along the flashes of sea, marsh, and town, I thought of my little flock that I had left behind for a day, with intense satisfaction and content. They were mine. Hildreth was my woman, Daniel had been my child for the space he was with us. And I held Darrie in friendly tenderness, much as the bourgeois business man holds the supernumerary women of his household, though she was by no means that, nor was she in any way dependent on me....
I was finding it very good to own, to possess, to take root; to be possessed and owned, in turn. I carried an obscure sense of triumph over Baxter.
Darrie, who had been to town the week before, had come back with a report of Penton's unhappiness, his belated acknowledgment that he was still, in spite of his battle against the feeling, deeply in love with his discarded wife. It was not so easy to tear her out of his heart, she had intertwined so deeply there ... eight years with a woman, and one child by her, and affection for her was no easy thing to root up from one's being.
"I sat there a long while with him in Riverside Park," Darrie reported, "it was chilly and he wore an old overcoat because he couldn't afford a new one. His hair was greying at the temples. He looked stooped, aging, frail as if an extra wind might lift him up and carry him away from me....
"He was worried about my having been brought into what he called 'the mess' ... wondered how the papers had not scented 'the other woman' in me, no matter how innocent I was of that appellation.
"He seemed so lonely ... admitted he was so lonely....
"Johnnie, you're both poor, dear innocents, that's what you are—