He tried to write poetry for the magazines and permanently destroyed what little respect Kedzie had for the art. Hunting for some little love-word that was unimportant when found threw him into frenzies of rage. He went about mumbling gibberish.
“What in hell rhymes with heaven?” he would snarl. “Beven, ceven, Devon, fevon, gevin, given—” And so on to “zeven.” Then “breven, creven, dreven” and “bleven, eleven, dleven” and “pseven, spleven, threven” and so forth.
At length he would hurl his pen across the room, pull at his hair, and light another cigarette. Cigarette always rhymed with cigarette.
After a day or two of this drivel he produced a brief lyric with a certain fleetness of movement; it had small freight to carry. He took it to a number of editors he knew, and one of them accepted it as a kindness.
Kedzie was delighted till she heard that it would bring into the exchequer about seven dollars when the check came, which would be in two weeks.
When Gilfoyle was not fighting at composition he was calling the editors hard names and deploring the small remuneration given to poets by a pork-packing nation. Or he would be hooting ridicule at the successful poets and growing almost as furious against the persons addicted to the fashionable vers libre as he was against the wealthy classes.
It seemed to Kedzie that nothing on earth was less important than prosody, and that however badly poets were paid, they were paid more than they earned. She grew so lonely for some one to talk to that she decided to call on old Mrs. Jambers at the boarding-house. She planned to stop in at dinner-time, in the hope of being asked to sit in at a real meal. The task of cooking what she could afford to buy robbed her of all appetite, and she was living mainly on fumes of food and gas.
She was growing thinner and shabbier of soul, and she knew it. She put off the call till she could endure her solitude no longer; then she visited Mrs. Jambers. A new maid met her at the door and barred her entrance suspiciously. Mrs. Jambers was out. So was Mrs. Bottger. So were the old boarders that Kedzie knew. New boarders had their rooms, Kedzie was exiled indeed.
She turned away, saying: “Tell Mrs. Jambers that Anita Adair stopped to say hello. I was just passing.”
“Anita Adair?” said the maid. “You was Anita Adair, yes? Wait once. It is a letter for you by downstairs.”