“Landlady supports those who can’t?”
“That’s the way I see it. The green front in Harrow Street took hold of me. I must have stayed over two hours. Our Mr. Naidu made some coffee to go with that cabinet of porcelain. Also there was a little girl—from Los Angeles, I think they said—red head, brown wool dress and eyes of a blue you see on illumined vellum out of Italy——”
“Some cerulean,” said John Higgins.
“They weren’t large, particularly,” Dicky went on at his literary best, “but that extraordinary blue like the ocean. Ruffled on top, but calm and still in the depth! Never saw such eyes. They come back to me now——”
“They do to me, Dicky.”
“You’re not getting all I mean, John. Uptown here, we think we’re the center of the world, the heart of New York yanking up toward the Park—but down there those old rooming houses are filling up with the boys and girls from all the States west, and the second growths from the families of European immigrants—filling up because they are cheap, with the boys and girls who will do the surgery ten years from now, and the painting and writing and acting——”
“I’ve heard about all that,” said John Higgins. “You’ll do a big story yourself one day.”
“I’m not so sure of it, since yesterday. I couldn’t take their chances. I couldn’t sit down and do a novel and not know how I was going to eat my way through. I couldn’t scrub tenement-house floors for the privilege of writing a book.... Oh, I love books all right. I rise up and yell when a big short story comes in the office, or breaks out anywhere. I think I know a real one, but a man’s got to do a whole lot of appreciating before he gets to doing. I’m not bred somehow as those people are. I’m the first of the Cobdens to break out of trade. They call me a dreamer, my people do—yet compared to those boys and girls in Harrow Street, I’m a basket of fish with only a wiggle at the bottom——”
“Get out,” said John Higgins. “The first thing you know, you’ll be going down there again.”
“I will,” said Dicky. “I’m going down there to live.”