d certain pickings
from the publishers' lists. India had not prepared Bedient for this.
With glad welcome he discovered David Cairns here and there among
short-story contributors, but the love of man and woman which the
stories in general exploited, struck him of Indian ideals as shifty and
pestilential. The woman of fiction was equipped with everything to make
her as common as man. She was glib, pert, mundane, her mind a
chatter-mill; a creature of fur, paint, hair, and absurdly young. The
clink of coins was her most favorable accompaniment; and her giving of
self was a sort of disrobing formality. The men who pursued her were
forward and solicitous. There was something of sacrilege about it all.
The minds and souls of real women--such were not matters for American
story; and yet the Americans wrote with dangerous facility. Bedient,
who worshipped the abstraction, Womanhood, felt his intelligence
seared, calcined.... Only here and there was a bit of real
literature--usually by a woman. The men seemed hung up to dry at
twenty-five. There was no manhood of mind.

Bedient's sense of loneliness became pervasive. Apparently he was
outside the range of consciousness--for better or worse--with the
country to which he had always hoped to give his best years. His ideals
of the literary art were founded upon large flexible lines of beauty
into which every dimension of life fell according to the reader's
vision. He felt himself alone; that he was out of alignment with this
young race from which he had sprung, to wander so far and so long.

And yet there was a Woman up there for him to know. This was imbedded
in his consciousness. Soon he should go to her.... He should find her.
And as the Hindu poets falteringly called upon the lotos and the
nectars; upon the brilliance of midday athwart the plain, and the glory
of moonlight upon mountain and glacier and the standing water of
foliaged pools; upon the seas at large, and the stars and the bees and
the gods--to express the triune loveliness of woman (which mere man may
only venture to appraise, not to know)--so should he, Bedient, envision
the reality when the winds of the world brought him home to her heart.

* * * * *

There was much to do at the _hacienda_. The Captain was past riding a
great deal, and the large hill and river property--the coffee, cacao,
cotton, cane and tobacco industries profited much better with an
overseer. Still Bedient sl