there was a ray of light in it from this kind of
telling. A man who spends five months of his best hours of life in
telling a story, can't do it over in ten minutes and drive a machine at
the same time----"

"We're getting out of the crowd. What did the girl do?" I asked.

"Well, she wanted a little baby--was ready to die for it, but had her
own ideas of what the Father should be. A million women--mostly having
been married and failed, have thought the same thing here in
America--pricked the unclean sham of the whole business. Moreover,
they're the best women we've got. There are----"

He purposely shook the hat from his head--back into the seat--at this
point.

"There are some young women coming up into maturity here in America--God
bless 'em--who are almost brave enough to set out on the quest for the
Father of the baby that haunts them to be born.... That's what she did.
He was a young man doing his own kind of work--doctoring among the poor,
let us say, mainly for nothing--killing himself among men and women and
babies; living on next to nothing, but having a half-divine kind of
madness to lift the world.... She saw him. You can picture that. They
were two to make one--and a third. She knew. There was a gold light
about his head which she saw--and some of the poverty-folk saw--but
which he didn't know the meaning of, and the world missed altogether.

"She went to him. It's cruel to put it in this way.... I'm not saying
anything about the writing or about what happened, but the scene as it
came to me was the finest thing I ever tried to put down. We always fall
down in the handling, you know.... I did it the best I could.... No, I'm
not going to tell you what happened. Only this: a little
afterward--along about page two hundred of the copy--the woman's soul
woke up."

"Why not, in God's name?" I asked.

He glanced quickly at me as a man does from ahead when his car is
pressing the limit.

"Ever have a book fail?" he asked.

"Seven," said I.

He cleared his throat and the kindest smile came into his eyes:

"They tell me at my publishers' that I slowed up my last book badly--by
taking a woman's soul out for an airing--just a little invalid kind of a
soul, too. Souls don't wake up in American novels any more. You can't do
much more in print nowadays than you can do on canvas--I mean _movie_
canvas. You can paint _soul_ but you can't photograph it--that's the
point. The movies have put imagination to death