Than sit with ghosts awaiting your return.
“These are the four best lines,” Judy pointed out when she had finished reading. “I took out parts of the first three lines and switched the last three over toward the beginning. It’s more coherent that way if anyone should ever try to figure it out. But the middle stanza must either stay as it is or be taken out entirely. Which do you think, Miss Grimshaw?”
“I’d take it out,” she declared. “There’s too much truth in it.”
Too much truth? A person who could not die! Who drifted off in air! Judy would have said exactly the opposite. It was too impossible.
“Didn’t the poet explain what she meant when the manuscript was delivered?” she asked.
“Explain it! Humph! Jasper Crosby expects me to explain it. He’s the poet’s brother,” the agent pointed out. “He brings me the stuff in just such a jumble as this.”
The pile before her on the desk eloquently illustrated the word “jumble.” Old envelopes, bills, sales sheets, anything that happened to be about, had been used for the poet’s snatches of verse.
“It must take a lot of time to rearrange them,” Judy ventured.
“Time! That’s just it. Time and patience, too. But Jasper Crosby cares as much about the value of my time as a newborn baby. He never talks except in terms of dollars and cents. ‘What can you make out of this?’ ‘How much do we get out of that?’ And expects me to rewrite half of it! It’s trying my patience to the limit, I can tell you. If I weren’t so fond of the poet I would have given it up years ago. Her verses used to be of quite a different type. You know Golden Girl?”
“You mean the popular song? Of course I do.”