“It’s becoming very amusing,” Helgin continued. “Nowadays, if you meet a manicurist you never know when she’s going to stop polishing your nails and draw the great, American lyric out of her sleeve, and the waiter at the café tries to induce you to read his startling, unpublished novel, and the bootblack shoves a short-story under your nose. None of these people would dare to attempt a painting or a sonata. The popular superstition is that literature consists of a deep longing plus thousands of words thrown helter-skelter together.”
“Well, it doesn’t hurt them to try—they’ll never find out what their ability is, ’f they don’t,” Blanche replied, defiantly.
“That’s right, don’t let him razz you,” Margaret broke in. “Masefield was once a bar-room porter, you know.”
“Please pick out a better example,” Oppendorf said.
Then he turned to Blanche.
“Your grammar is atrocious at times, but you have originality, and there’s a razor in your humor,” he went on. “Keep on writing, and study syntax and the declensions of verbs—they’re still fairly well observed by every one except the Dadaists. I’ll have you in several magazines in another two months. And thank God you’re not a poet. If you were, you’d get fifty cents a line, mixed in with profound excuses!”
“Do you really mean it?” Blanche asked, delightedly.
“Of course.”
“Why, I’ll work like a nigger ’f I can really make something of myself as a writer,” Blanche cried, enraptured.
“I hope you’re not giving any pleasant mirages to Miss Palmer,” Helgin said, wondering whether Oppendorf was not merely seeking to flatter her into an eventual physical capitulation. “I know your weakness. When we were getting out The New Age you’d plague me every day with verses from girl-friends of yours, and they were always rank imitations of your own style.”