"And you?"
Dickie stared at her with parted lips. He seemed afraid to breathe lest he startle away some hesitant hope. "I?" he whispered.
"I mean—you don't like the East?—You will give up your work?"
"Oh—" He dropped back. The hope had flown and he was able to breathe again, though breathing seemed to hurt. "Yes, ma'am. I'll give up newspaper reporting. I don't like New York."
"But, Dickie—your—words? I'd like to see something you've written."
Dickie's hand went to an inner pocket.
"I wanted you to see this, Sheila," His eyes were lowered to hide a flaming pride. "My poems."
Sheila felt a shock of dread. Dickie's poems! She was afraid to read them. She could not help but think of his life at Millings, of that sordid hotel lobby … Newspaper stories—yes—that was imaginable. But—poetry? Sheila had been brought up on verse. There was hardly a beautiful line that had not sung itself into the fabric of her brain.
"Poems?" she repeated, just a trifle blankly; then, seeing the hurt in his face, about the sensitive and delicate lips, she put out a quick, penitent hand. "Let me see them—at once!"
He handed a few folded papers to her. They were damp. He put his face down to his hands and looked at the floor as though he could not bear to watch her face. Sheila saw that he was shaking. It meant so much to him, then—? She unfolded the papers shrinkingly and read. As she read, the blood rushed to her checks for shame. She ought never to have doubted him. Never after the first look into his face, never after hearing him speak of the "cold, white flame" of an unforgotten winter night. Dickie's words, so greatly loved and groped for, so tirelessly pursued in the face of his world's scorn and injury, came to him, when they did come, on wings. In the four short poems, there was not a word outside of his inner experience, and yet she felt that those words had blown through him mysteriously on a wind—the wind that fans such flame—