“Eh?”
The younger man nodded seriously. “They’re crazy, perhaps, but I’m convinced from yesterday of one thing: One can’t be sane as I am, and ever find the Big Story, much less write it.”
“Therefore the first thing to do is to go insane.”
“It isn’t like that,” Dicky said gently. “I’ve been brought up to think I know New York, belong and breathe in New York. You see, my family has lived here a hundred years. But yesterday I saw New York for the first time. She isn’t an old Dutch frump, as we thought, John. She’s a damsel! She’s a new moon——”
“Blue eyes?” said John Higgins.
“No, that’s the little girl from Los Angeles. It’s the landlady, of course, who’s the spirit of the place. I figured out afterward that it was because she was there that I liked everybody and had a good time. Wouldn’t be surprised to hear she was a priestess of some sort. I asked if she were Hindu, and she said ‘Yes,’ but she talks as if she were out of an English convent. Of course, most of her lodgers don’t get her. One old actor, out of a job, leaned across the table to me yesterday when Miss Claes left the room. He tapped his forehead, whispering, ‘Lovely, eh, but got the Ophelias.’”
“Is she young?” John Higgins asked presently.
“Moreover,” Dicky added, lost in thought, “I believe Miss Claes knows that they think her cracked and doesn’t mind.... Young? Say, I don’t know, John. You don’t think of her with years, somehow—rather as one who has reached the top of herself and decided to stay there.”
John Higgins leaned back, drained his coffee cup and stared with eyes that smarted at the steaming ceiling. “Is Naidu going to do us another story?”
“We didn’t get to that, but they gave me a novel manuscript to read.”