Mildred and Corinne fed him and petted him while Humphrey drew a big chair into the dining-room, smoked cigarette after cigarette, and studied the brightening, expanding youth before him. He reflected, too, on the curious, instant responsiveness that is roused in the imaginative woman at the first evidence of the creative impulse in a man. As if the elemental mother were moved.
'That's probably it,' he thought. 'And it's what the boy has needed. Martha Caldwell couldn't give it to him—never in the world! He was groping to find it in that tough little Wilcox girl. It wouldn't do to tell him—no, I mustn't tell him; got to steady him down all I can—but I rather guess he's been needing a Mildred and a Corinne. These two years.'
9
Humphrey stood up then, said he was going out for half an hour, and picked up the manuscript from the living-room table as he passed.
He went straight to Boice's house on Upper Chestnut Avenue.
'What has all this to do with me?' asked Mr Boice, behind closed doors in his roomy library. 'Let him write anything he likes.'
Humphrey sat back; slowly turned the pages of the manuscript.
'This,' he said, 'is a real piece of writing. It's the best picture of a community outing I ever read in my life. It's vivid. The characters are so real that a stranger, after reading this, could walk up Simpson Street and call fifteen people by name. He'd know how their voices sound, what their weaknesses are, what they're really thinking about Sunday mornings in church. It is humour of the finest kind. But they won't know it on Simpson Street. They'll be sore as pups, every man. He's taken their skulls off and looked in. He's as impersonal, as cruel, as Shakespeare.'
This sounded pretty highfalutin' to Mr Boice. He made a reflective sound; then remarked:—
'You think the advertisers wouldn't like it,'