“Oh, he is wrong!” Instinctively Thurley was displeased.
“May you always think so, but when the distressingly rich wheeze up in satin-lined cabs and ask you to accompany them to a distressingly vulgar palace and have you sing a song or two at a thousand dollars each; when every one comes salaaming and saluting you, and you, too, begin to have visions of acquiring a vulgar palace all your own and are, therefore, pompous and impossible as so many of us foolish children of light allow ourselves to become; when you look about the salon to select the richest husband or admirer and deliberately neglect your voice for your coiffure and your repertoire for your wardrobe—well, perhaps you may withstand it, but it is a rare happening! Bliss says he has yet to find it otherwise.”
“A thousand dollars a song.” Thurley recalled that day—how many lifetimes ago—that Dan engaged her to sing at his circus in connection with “the great swinging man” and had emptied his spending-money pocket into her ragged lap. “Oh, no, they only pay a thousand dollars a song in one of Mr. Patmore’s novels.”
“Mr. Patmore,” continued the woman who loved him more dearly than she did herself, “takes his copy from friends, like a bee flitting here and there and returning to the hive honey-laden. We have all accused him of hiding behind screens to gain conversation.”
Thurley laughed. “Do they never tip over?”
“They do if we suspect he is behind them,” Ernestine replied with a smile.
“What does he do with all his money? He must be very rich if the reports are true. Why even at the Corners we sold a hundred copies of ‘Victorious Victoria,’ and it was stupid, even the description of a new way for Victoria to be kissed.”
“‘Victorious Victoria’! It is engraven on my heart. I tried harder to make him burn the manuscript than I did to play well before Queen Mary and King George,” she said in a dull voice. “Yet she was ‘Victorious Victoria,’ for she gave her sponsor a new motor and a lot of foolish jewelry and a Japanese valet and some first editions that he boasted of having wrenched from a millionaire at an auction sale! You see, Caleb thinks there is no need to sacrifice for one’s ideals or to be above a purchase price for mediocre work. He says, ‘Writing is a trade. We must all come in on a time clock or be taken to an insane asylum. Give the public what it wants and with their money we can buy what we want. Let the public take the consequent softening of the brain. Younger generations will always be appearing like spring violets and measles to save us authors’ and artists’ bacon!’ There is the alpha and omega of his philosophy. One might as well throw oneself against a stone fortress as to make him reason otherwise. Blind, blind as an adder!” She broke off abruptly to call Thurley’s attention to some pottery she had picked up in Dutch Guiana which could not be obtained save as one became a friend of the natives.
Then a maid came in with the tea-cart and Ernestine began asking as to “one lump or two—cream or sugar or lemon.”
“Your dress is so interesting,” Thurley remarked to break the lull.