“She has devoured a folio a week for ten years, and put out a lot of drivel each six months. Having exhausted art and letters she is trying her hand on religion now and coquetting with her soul.”
“You are a precious lot!” Jennings laughed again hilariously.
“We attract recruits. Here is a noteworthy example, he implied, whom I am disciplining.”
“Yes,” Jennings admitted, taking a cigarette from the tea-tray, and lighting it judiciously. “So I see. When I was over here last, the neophyte was an ingenuous youth, who was delving into his ego. He changed his opinions with the seasons. What became of him?”
“You mean Hiram Ernst. He recanted, having exhausted Europe, and is married now to a woman in Buffalo. He is practising law. He writes me bumptious letters every now and then.”
“And there was a southern poet, a flabby, fat youth of Plutonic dreariness, who lived on Turkish coffee and cigarettes. He wrote ditties to the infernal gods and emitted hints of mysterious vices.”
“He shut himself up in a villa at Amalfi with a volume of Petrarch, and has not been heard from since.”
“There were the women, too,” Jennings continued, reminiscentially. “Edith Sevan, a golden-haired little Puritan with a temperament. She used to play pretty well when she wasn’t overcome with emotion.”
“Married,” Erard replied, “and lost.”
“The Honourable Miss Vantine was stunning,—the cigarette-smoking, whiskey-and-soda one. She looked like a poppy and swore like a mule-driver. The last time I heard of her she had forsaken cigarettes for cigars and had punched an impertinent cabby. She was—well—tough.”