She had been gone for some time when he awoke. As he sat up, blinking through the late afternoon sunshine, a pencilled sheet of yellow manuscript paper fluttered from his breast to the floor.
Jim, it is fine! I mean it! It is a splendid, virile, honest piece of work. And it is intensely interesting. I'm quite mad about it—quite thrilled that you can do such things. It's so masterly, so mature—and I don't know where you got your knowledge of that woman, because she is perfectly feminine and women think and do such things, and her motives are the motives that animate that sort of woman.
As you lie there asleep you look about eighteen—not much older than when I used to see you when you came home from school and lay on your sofa and read Kipling aloud to me. Then I was awed; you were a grown man to me. Now you are just a boy again, and I love you dearly, and I'm going to kiss your hair, very cautiously, before I go downstairs.
I've done it. I'm going now.
STEVE.
CHAPTER XXII
It happened one day late in May that Cleland, desiring local accuracy of detail in a chapter of his brand new novel, put on his hat and walked to Washington Square and across it, south, into the slums.
New leaves graced the trees in the park; spring flowers bloomed around the fountain, and the grass was rankly fragrant where it had just been mowed.
But he left the spring freshness behind him when he entered that sad, dingy, swarming region to the south, where the only clean creature seemed to be the occasional policeman in his new summer tunic, sauntering aloof amid the noise and wretchedness and the foul odours made fouler by the sunshine.
Cleland presently found the squalid street which he wished to describe in convincing detail, and stood there on the corner in the shelter of a tobacconist's awning making preliminary mental notes. Then, as he fished out note-book and pencil, intent on professional memoranda, he saw Grismer.