"Won't you allow me to keep at least one
dream?"
He tried to be tragic right there in the street; but I read him like a
book.
"Don't be an ass, old fellow. You're not a poet, you know--you're a
happy dabbler in prose; but you've got to wake up--you've got to have
some vital experience before you can hope to reach the top. This
vicarious loving isn't worth a tin whistle. You're like a soldier in the
barracks compared to one who's in the thick of the fight. Wake up, shake
yourself, get out of your shell, and see how much greater you'll be!"
He didn't like that. He never liked the truth. How few of us do!
The next thing I knew he was off for Japan, and he sent me pretty
post-cards of geisha-girls, and tried to indicate that he was having the
time of his life, at last. But there was something false--I cannot quite
express it--about his messages. They didn't ring true at all. He knew
it, and he knew that I knew it.
III
When he came back, after a year or so, there was a vast change in him.
He was more sure of himself; and in the Martin one night he told me how
various other periodicals were now after him. His rate would have to go
up, and all that sort of thing. He liked me, and _The Athenian_, but one
must grow, and there were wider fields for him to penetrate; and it was
all right that we had made him what he was, but in the final summing up
a man must think of himself, and one's career was one's career, you
know.
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