shy poems. Poetry was said to be looking up in those days; and
influential critics in their influential, uninfluenced way suddenly
boomed these, saying mostly the wrong things about them, but saying them
over and over with energy and persistence. The first edition vanished
overnight; a larger second edition was printed and sold out within a
week or two; a still larger third edition was launched and disposed of
more slowly. Then came the war....

V

If I can say anything good of the war, it is this: Since seemingly it
must have come anyway, sooner or later, so far as Susan is concerned it
came just in time. A letter from Phil to Susan, received toward the
close of July, 1914, at the chateau of the Comtesse de Bligny, near
Brussels, will tell you why.

"_Dear Susan_: If the two or three notes I've sent
you previously have been brief and dull, I knew
you would make the inevitable allowances and
forgive me. In the first place, God didn't create
me to scintillate, as you've long had reason to
know; and since you left us I've been buried in a
Sahara of work, living so retired a life in my
desert that little news comes my way. But Jimmy
breaks in on me, always welcomely, with an
occasional bulletin, and last night Hunt came over
and we had a long evening together. He's worried,
Susan, not without great cause, I fear; he looks
tired and ill; and after mulling things over, with
my usual plodding caution--I've thought best to
explain the situation to you.

"It can be put in very few words. The deserved
success of your play and the poems, following a
natural law that one too helplessly wishes
otherwise, has led to a crisis in the
gossip--malicious in origin, certainly--which has
fastened upon you and Hunt; and this gossip lately
has taken a more sinister turn. More and more
openly it is being said that the circumstances
surrounding Mrs. Hunt's death ought to be
probed--'probed' is just now the popular word in
this connection. The feeling is widespread that
you were in some way responsible for it.

"I must use brutal phrases to lay the truth before
you. You are not, seemingly, suspected of murder.
You are suspected of having