Caleb met her, to be sure. But before he spoke she knew some catastrophe had happened in his affairs. As he piloted her to her apartment, trying to ask interested questions, and saying that she looked fagged and he thanked heaven she was not going for public talks, Ernestine waited for him to speak of himself.
To her amazement, he would have left her at the doorway. But she took his arm, as Thurley might have done, in impulsive fashion and commanded him to come inside.
Rather unwillingly, he obeyed, telling about Thurley and her “rather far-fetched scheme,” and Polly’s success and her tour of the country with Bliss who must be “completely out of his element” boosting for this and that and actually prophesying a near and sudden peace. Had she seen much of Mark? How was Lissa getting on? And where was Collin,—no need for him to rush over to fight beside bricklayers!
“What has happened,” Ernestine asked. “You are trying to lie to me—by silence. Don’t—don’t you care any more?” feeling a reluctance to speak of her own change of heart.
“Of course, but you can’t love a beggar,” he flung back roughly. “You don’t mean to say that when it’s too late you’ve come back prepared to marry a bankrupt—a failure,” his teeth gritted together.
“What are you babbling of? Please don’t be like a Henry James conversation, say it! I’ve learned to honor directness of speech and action.”
“I’ll oblige you and take my leave. The damned public is as fickle as a weather vane. They raved over my ‘Patriotic Burglar’—I made more off of it than any three of my other books. The public couldn’t get enough of it. And I went ahead, as I always do,” this with insolent assurance, “on my next best seller, ‘Military Molly’—no plot but a pretty girl, German spy and Yankee hero—it is enough for these days—there was to be a red, white and blue cover on it and Molly in her nursing costume. And the firm refused it! They dared to say the tide has turned against war fiction, people felt reality too keenly to want imaginary woes and victories pictured for them—they said that to me, Caleb Patmore,” he was unconscious of his absurdity, “when my books have made more money for them than any other author they have. They said it was thin and I had better take a long rest ... that an editor’s greatest need in the world was to discover whether or not an author was trying to kid himself and to disillusionize him as quickly and painlessly as possible—” he tried to laugh.
“That is not so bad,” Ernestine said quietly, “it had to come some time. Rest for a year and then see what your viewpoints are.”
“But I’m stony broke! I never dreamed I’d be turned down! They dared tell me the story had nothing to commend it save questionable cleverness in nomenclature.... Why, I was hard to convince when they first wrote me; I had made some bad plays on the stock market—I counted on ‘Military Molly’ to pull me out of the hole and my next book, ‘The Battles of Billy Girl,’ to get me back to where I was a year ago. I guess there will never be any more of my books, unless some one stakes me to publish independently and every one shies when you hint of it ... would you, Ernestine?”
“Not if you were never to speak to me.”