We easily came to terms under these circumstances, and I cannot tell you how happy I was to find myself once more surrounded by my books. As soon as they were in place and the study was handsomely furnished, my employer issued cards; and though he had nothing in common with the literary and artistic set, the mere fact that he controlled the columns of a great paper brought them all flocking to his afternoons. It is a case of mutual cultivation, and I am sick of being told to write puffs of books and pictures. Even foreigners do not seem above this log-rolling, and toady to the editor of the influential journal. And yet we think Johnson mean-spirited for standing at Chesterfield’s door! It humiliates me to see writers and artists stooping so low merely to get notices that are worthless in a critical sense, and doubly am I degraded that mine is the pen that aids in this contemptible chicane.
You, Mrs. Blodgett, and Agnes came to one of these afternoons, and made me happy, not alone by your presence, but by an insinuated reproof, which meant, I thought, that you had become enough interested in me to care what I did. You expressed surprise at my being there, and so I explained to you that I had become Mr. Whitely’s secretary.
“And is your work congenial?” you asked.
I shrugged my shoulders, and quoted, “Civilized man cannot live without dining.”
“But you told me you were making a living. Is not a crust with independence and a chance to make a name better than such work?”
“If one is free, yes. But if one must earn money?”
“I had somehow fixed it in my mind that you were en garçon. One’s fancies are sometimes very ridiculous. Who invented the mot that a woman’s intuitions were what she had when she was wrong?”
“Some man, of course,” I laughed. “And you were right in supposing me a bachelor.”
“How little people really know about one another,” you observed, “and yet we talk of the realism of life! I believe it is only in fiction that we get it.”
“Napoleon said, ‘Take away history and give me a novel: I wish the truth!’ Certainly, our present romance writers attempt it.”