He let his last word fall quietly as though it were a pebble he had dropped into a pool for the pleasure of watching the resulting ripples.
“If that’s what’s in your mind, the sooner you get it out the better!” snapped Redfield. “We’ve gone beyond all that!”
“The spring was unusually fine,” the Poet hastened to remark with cheerful irrelevance, as though all that had gone before had merely led up to the weather; “June is justifying Lowell’s admiration. Your view off there is splendid. It just occurs to me that these tall buildings are not bad approximations of ivory towers; a good place for dreams—nice horizons—edges of green away off there, and unless my sight is failing that’s a glimpse of the river you get beyond those heaven-kissing chimneys.”
Redfield mopped his brow and sighed his relief. Clearly the Poet, realizing the futility of the discussion, was glad to close it; and Redfield had no intention of allowing him to return to it.
He opened the door with an eagerness at which the Poet smiled as he walked deliberately through the outer room, exposing himself once more to the admiring smiles of the girls at the typewriters. He paused and told them a story, to which Redfield, from the threshold of his sanctum, listened perforce.
At the street entrance the Poet met Fulton hurrying into the building.
“I was just thinking of you!” cried the young man. “Half a minute ago I dropped a little packet with your name on it into the box at the corner, and was feeling like a criminal to think of what I was inflicting!”
“It occurs to me,” mused the Poet, leaning on his umbrella, quite indifferent to the hurrying crowd that swept through the entrance, “that the mail-box might be a good subject for a cheerful jingle—the repository of hopes, ambitions, abuse, threats, love letters, and duns. It’s by treating such subjects attractively that we may hope to reach the tired business man and persuade him that not weak-winged is song! Apollo leaning against a letter-box and twanging his lyre divine for the muses to dance a light fantastic round—a very pretty thought, Mr. Fulton!”
The Poet, obviously on excellent terms with the world, indulged himself further in whimsical comment on possible subjects for verse, even improvising a few lines of doggerel for the reporter’s amusement.
And then, after he had turned away, he called the young man back, as though by an afterthought.