story, and telling
it badly, I fear, for lack of narrative skill. So it is with no desire
to prolong cheaply a possible point of suspense that I must double back
now before I can go forward. My personal interest centers so entirely in
Susan herself, in the special qualities of her mind and heart, that I
have failed to bring in certain stiff facts--essential, alas, to all
further progress. A practiced novelist, handling this purely biographic
material--such a man as Clifton Young--would quietly have "planted"
these facts in their due order, thus escaping my present embarrassment.
But indeed I am approaching a cruel crisis in Susan's life and in the
lives of those dearest to her; a period of sheer circumstantial
fatality; one of those incursions of mad coincidence, of crass
melodrama, which--with a brutal, ironic, improbability, as if
stage-managed by an anarchistic fiend of the pit--bursts through some
fine-spun, geometrical web of days, leaving chaos behind; and I am
ill-equipped to deal with this chance destruction, this haphazard
wantonness.

Even could I merely have observed it from the outside, with aesthetic
detachment, it would baffle me now; I should find it too crude for art,
too arbitrary. It is not in my line. But God knows the victim of what
seems an insane break in Nature is in no mood for art; he can do little
more than cry out or foolishly rail!

* * * * *

Jimmy returned from his excursion to New York on the Sunday evening
preceding Miss Goucher's letter. She must have been at work on it the
next evening when Phil brought him to dine with me. It was our
deliberate purpose to draw him out, track his shy impressions of Susan
and of her new life in her new world. But it was hard going at first;
for ten minutes or so we bagged little but the ordinary Jimmyesque
_cliches_. He had had a great time, _etc._, _etc._...

Matters improved with the roast. It then appeared that he had lightly
explored with Susan the two-thirds of Gaul omitted from her letter. He
had called with her on Heywood Sampson, and fathomed Susan's allusion to
the shy bluebird. Mr. Sampson, he assured us, was a fine old boy--strong
for Susan too! He'd read a lot of her poems and things and was going to
bring out the poems for her right away. But the bluebird in the bush had
to do with a pet scheme of his for a weekly critical review of a
different stamp from Hadow Bury's _Whim_. Solider, Jimmy imagined; safe