He was gone too quickly for her to answer. She did not see him again for a week, and when she did she invited him to tea. In an hour he was as much at his ease as though he had known her forever, and stayed so long he expressed the fear of having bored her. Soon after that she was seeing him two or three times a week.
He came because she listened to his monologues. Moira found that this was the man’s characteristic. Shy to the point of morbidness in company, she no sooner began to encourage him alone than he talked without end. His ideas were neither very well thought out nor very clearly expressed, but they stimulated her. He poured forth the most curious tag-ends of experience, made extraordinary confessions with few traces of shame, chattered cynically, humorously, passionately and autocratically by turns about writing and all the arts, and then stopped suddenly in the midst of things, frightened to silence by the realization of her presence and the boldness of his own tongue. Only one thing could have enabled him to indulge this luxury and keep coming—a knowledge of her interest, and she gave it honestly. She saw that the inner life of this young man and her own had been similar. He soon passed from Miss Smith to Mary, and from Mary to Madonna, and finding that the last was to his taste, he held to it. Before long he was giving full rein to a natural streak of fantastic high spirits and messing about her place like a privileged person.
She was, for some reason, wholly delighted by all this. The crushed spirit he had shown at their first meeting had seemed tragically inappropriate and she was glad to be drawing anybody out who needed it. The man, set beside most of the people she had known, was a freak, certainly, but he was not an impossible freak. And he differed from such people as Selden Van Nostrand in depth, breadth and sensitive contact with life. With a perfectly conventional background, he had simply, she thought, allowed his spiritual life to express itself in his physical life from an early age. His courtesy was innate and usually unfailing, on some occasions oppressive—but it was a quality she would not have liked to find lacking. His flattery she had to accept as simply as she could; he exhausted his vocabulary in finding terms for her beauty. It seemed an ever-renewed miracle to him, which he had to talk about to enjoy.
“Madonna,” he said one day, “you should be some queen like Margaret of Navarre. I should like to be one of the story tellers of your court. It is a commentary on our beastly times that such a one as you is a stenographer.”
“If I had the courage—as you have—I wouldn’t be,” she laughed, “but it scares me to think of going my own way.”
“Ah, that is one thing I came to ask you about. I must have told you that I intend going into business.”
“But why?” she asked, “why should you, after all?”
“Well, when we are young we expect all things to come to us. We don’t want them just to-day, but to-morrow?—we’ll whistle and down they will come from the sky. That’s what we think. In my case, however, they haven’t come. Ergo, I have lived disgracefully. Now I must begin to die gracefully by turning to work. Yet isn’t it possible to look upon the grotesque preoccupation of the American male as a trade, a form of artisan-ship, a deed of the left hand? I know a man who sells advertising, and who has more confidence in me than I should dare to have in myself. He is decent enough to think that I can supply what he wants. Why not try it?”
“Aren’t you writing anything nowadays, Miles?”
“Nothing,” he said, with a shrug. “Book reviews! What are book reviews? Every time I have to go to see an editor and ask for a book, it makes me feel as though selling hairpins from house to house is more respectable. Besides, the literary world has forgotten me. I only fill up space.”