Hartley decided that Repellier was right when he had said that this great city of the New World could wring out of a man all that was best in him. As he sped southward through the noise and the dust and the crowds, with his thoughts far into the future, he seemed to find some pleasing felicitousness in the very ambiguity of Repellier's phrase. But must the price of success, he asked himself, always be so great?
"Do you know," said Cordelia Vaughan musingly to the Spauldings that night as they drove down through the darkness of Riverside Park on their way home from dining at the Claremont--"do you know, I feel like work, hard work, once more?"
Take heed, for the sake of your soul, Of the song that the city sings-- Of its bantering lip, and its bowl, And its flutter of fallen wings.
These Lilliputian temptations--they remind us that the threads which kept Gulliver down were very small threads, but then there were so many of them!--"The Silver Poppy."
"How much space shall I give Miss Vaughan?" Hartley asked of his editor. It was the end of the day following the interview, and the gentleman addressed was enjoying what he called a dry smoke, contentedly chewing a black cigar-end into obviously delectable rags and shreds. He allowed his questioner to wait for a minute or two before answering.
Just who that lady was he knew quite well, but he took a secret delight in baiting his probationers--and Hartley above all others.
"She is the lady," and the irate young man laid particular stress on the word, "the lady whom I suggested to you as being more or less before the public, as you may recall--the lady who wrote The Silver Poppy, and----"
"Yes, I know all that. 'Bout how much time did you give her yesterday? The whole afternoon, I guess, wasn't it?"
"I don't see what that has to do with my question," retorted Hartley.
"You don't, eh! H'm; I guess you don't." He seemed bent on provoking beyond endurance the young man with the accent. And the young man with the accent could foresee that it was going to lead to but one end. He swallowed his wrath, however, and his editor swung round in his swivel chair, and replacing his cigar in its accustomed corner of a mouth that seemed to Hartley belligerently dog-like, looked at him shrewdly.