“Tut-tut, tell me what you think! Never mind what you know.”
“His novels, even though they sell in as small towns as the Corners, are rather—rather—” She floundered piteously.
Ernestine came to the rescue, her scarlet lips curving down in hurt fashion as she answered, “His novels for the most part comprise tattling on blondined art models—and brides! Caleb believes that art must be on a strictly commercial basis and that no art should be enduring, ‘any more than a bath,’ as he explains, ‘but quite as necessary and frequent.’”
“Oh, he is wrong!” Instinctively Thurley was displeased.
“May you always think so, but when the distressingly rich wheeze up in satin-lined cabs and ask you to accompany them to a distressingly vulgar palace and have you sing a song or two at a thousand dollars each; when every one comes salaaming and saluting you, and you, too, begin to have visions of acquiring a vulgar palace all your own and are, therefore, pompous and impossible as so many of us foolish children of light allow ourselves to become; when you look about the salon to select the richest husband or admirer and deliberately neglect your voice for your coiffure and your repertoire for your wardrobe—well, perhaps you may withstand it, but it is a rare happening! Bliss says he has yet to find it otherwise.”
“A thousand dollars a song.” Thurley recalled that day—how many lifetimes ago—that Dan engaged her to sing at his circus in connection with “the great swinging man” and had emptied his spending-money pocket into her ragged lap. “Oh, no, they only pay a thousand dollars a song in one of Mr. Patmore’s novels.”
“Mr. Patmore,” continued the woman who loved him more dearly than she did herself, “takes his copy from friends, like a bee flitting here and there and returning to the hive honey-laden. We have all accused him of hiding behind screens to gain conversation.”
Thurley laughed. “Do they never tip over?”
“They do if we suspect he is behind them,” Ernestine replied with a smile.
“What does he do with all his money? He must be very rich if the reports are true. Why even at the Corners we sold a hundred copies of ‘Victorious Victoria,’ and it was stupid, even the description of a new way for Victoria to be kissed.”