He tried to solace himself with the thought that his failure was the result of his years of undergraduate abstraction; that it was the penalty of the too cloistral life.
The taste of those days when the world has failed to find youth because youth has not yet found itself is unspeakably bitter in the mouth of the young man who knows his strength. And Hartley, striding homeward through the hot, noisy, evening streets, was not altogether happy.
As he noticed, on the stroke of six, the warehouses and shops and factories of the lower East Side disgorging their tides of hurrying, bustling men and women and boys and girls, some alleviating sense of the nobility of labor crept over him, like a breath of cool air from the river front.
In this mood he climbed his steep stairs, and sat down at his little deal table, glowing with the ideas that flowered out of his touch of revolt. The author of The Silver Poppy would have opened her gray-green eyes in wonder had she read those sheets which he flung off under his quick, nervous pen. How were these women, he asked himself as he wrote, who wasted so lightly when there were so many in want, how were these women who knew nothing of real life, rustling so well clad through their softly lighted libraries, to know anything of the great tragic, turgid, naked world, of the storm and stress of life? What did they, sitting secluded behind their roses, know of the dust and tumult and tragedy of the street? Let them go out and suffer and learn, and if through hunger and tears and loneliness they found some hidden meaning and purpose in the dark undercurrents of adversity and defeat, then let them in all patience and humility speak what they had to say. Willingly enough the world would listen, without their thousand and one artifices to catch its languid ear. But until then they should get no help from him.
And when he had finished his article on Cordelia Vaughan he sat back in his hard chair and felt more at peace with the world and with himself. He felt, as he glanced around at his broken walls and his ragged furniture, that he had justified himself; for he was at heart still buoyant and young. It is a sorrowful day when the eyes of youth can gaze openly into the eyes of defeat.