That evening when she opened the street door to him she said, “Go right along up; I guess you’ll find them there all right,” and Ray mounted obediently. Half-way up he met Mrs. Denton coming down, with her cat in her arms. “Oh, well!” she said. “You’ll find Peace at home; I’ll be back in a moment.”
He suspected that Mrs. Denton fostered the belief of the machinist and his wife that there was a tacit if not an explicit understanding between himself and Peace, and he thought that she would now very probably talk the matter over with them. But he kept on up to the little apartment at the top of the house, and tapped on the door standing wide open. The girl was sitting at one of the windows, with her head and bust sharply defined against the glassy clear evening light of the early summer. She had her face turned toward the street, and remained as if she did not hear him at first, so that there was a moment when it went through his mind that he would go away. Then she looked round, and greeted him; and he advanced into the room, and took the seat fronting her on the other side of the window. There was a small, irregular square below, and above the tops of its trees the swallows were weaving their swift flight and twittering song; the street noises came up slightly muted through the foliage; it was almost like a sylvan withdrawal from the city’s worst; and they talked of the country, and how lovely it must be looking now.
He said: “Yes, I wonder we can ever leave it. This is the first spring-time that I have ever been where I couldn’t feel my way with Nature at every step she took. It’s like a great loss out of my life. I think sometimes I am a fool to have staid here; I can never get it back. I could have gone home, and been the richer by the experience of another spring. Why didn’t I do it?”
“Perhaps you couldn’t have done your work there,” she suggested.
“Oh, my work! That is what people are always sacrificing the good of life to—their work! Is it worth so much? If I couldn’t do my newspaper-work there, I could do something else. I could write another unsuccessful novel.”
“Is your novel a failure?” she asked.
“Don’t you know it is? It’s been out three weeks, and nobody seems to know it. That’s my grief, now; it may one day be my consolation. I don’t complain. Mr. Brandreth still keeps his heroic faith in it, and even old Kane was trying to rise on the wings of favorable prophecy when I saw him just before dinner. But I haven’t the least hope any more. I think I could stand it better if I respected the book itself more. But to fail in a bad cause—that’s bitter.” He stopped, knowing as well as if he had put his prayer in words, that he had asked her to encourage him, and if possible, flatter him.
“I’ve been reading it all through again, since it came out,” she said.
“Oh, have you?” he palpitated.
“And I have lent it to the people in the house here, and they have read it. They are very intelligent in a kind of way”—