notized. He could sell ten
copies of a book where a reviewer could sell one. His word on a play
was final--or almost. Personal mention of any of the Sophisticates
added a cubit to reputation. Three mentions made them household words.
Neglect caused agonies and visions of extinction. Disparagement was
preferable. By publicity shall ye know them. Even public men with
rhinocerene hides had been seen to shiver. Cause women courted him.
Prize fighters on the dour morn after a triumphant night had howled
between fury and tears as Mr. Lee Clavering (once crack reporter of the
gentle art) wrote sadly of greater warriors. Lenin had mentioned him
as an enemy of the new religion, who dealt not with the truth. Until
he grew dull--no grinning skeleton as yet--his public, after hasty or
solemn digestion of the news, would turn over to his column with a sigh
of relief. But he must hang on, no doubt of that. Fatal to give the
public even a hint that it might learn to do without him.

He sighed and closed his eyes again. It was not unpleasant to feel
himself a slave, a slave who had forged his own gilded chains. But he
sighed again for his lost simplicities, for his day-dreams under the
magnolias when he had believed that if women of his class were not
obliged to do their own housework they would all be young and beautiful
and talk only of romance; when he had thought upon the intellectual
woman and the woman who "did things" as an anomaly and a horror. Well,
the reality was more companionable, he would say that for them. . . .
Then he grinned as he recalled the days of his passionate socialism,
when he had taken pains, like every socialist he had ever met, to let
it be understood that he had been born in the best society. Well, so
he had, and he was glad of it, even if the best society of his small
southern town had little to live on but its vanished past. He never
alluded to his distinguished ancestry now that he was eminent and
comfortable, and he looked back with uneasy scorn upon his former
breaches of taste, but he never quite forgot it. No Southerner ever
does.

The play droned on to the end of the interminable first act. Talk.
Talk. Talk. He'd go to sleep, but would be sure to get a crick in his
neck. Then he remembered a woman who had come down the aisle just as
the lights were lowering and passed his seat. He had not seen her
face, but her graceful figure had attracted his attention, and the
peculiar s