h his own initials on.

So from week to week he put off becoming an artist and one year (after a
four-month love affair and two lacquer cabinets) he made a lecture tour
in America.

"Was it a success?" I asked wearily (Delancey's success is always such a
terribly foregone conclusion).

"Tremendous," he beamed. "I was careful to be a little dull because then
they think they're learning something." But he was out of love, the flat
was overcrowded, money continued to pour in and he knew terribly well
that he was not making a contribution to contemporary literature.

He had always assured me at intervals that some day he would write his
"real book" but I think it was after his tour in America that the dream
became a project. He burst in to tell me about it. Delancey always
begins things with a sudden noisy rush.

"Charlotte," he said, "I have made up my mind."

"It sounds very momentous," I teased. He decided years ago that I was
grave, fastidious, whimsical, aloof and (I suspect) a little faded. I
have long given up fighting my own battle (to be known) because I
realise that Delancey never revises the passports given to old ideas.
There is always, to him, something a little bit sacred about the
accepted. "I can't go on with it any longer," he explained.

"Go on with what?"

"My damned stories."

"How ungrateful you are," I murmured, thinking of the lacquer cabinets,
"you have a market, you can command a price. Each of your love affairs
is more magnificently studded with flowers than the last----"

"Be quiet," he said. "I came to you because I knew that you would
understand."

"You are trying to blackmail me."

"Do be serious," he pleaded. "I am going to give all that up. I have
determined to settle down and dedicate myself entirely to my book."

"But," I expostulated, "have you thought of the yearning _Saturday
Evening Post_, of the deserted _Strand_?"

"I have thought of everything," he said, "I shall be sacrificing 5,000
pounds a year, but what is 5,000 pounds a year?"

I thought of the taffetas curtains and the cigars, but I answered quite
truthfully.

"I don't know."

"You see, Charlotte," he dropped the noble for the confidential, "I have
got things to say, things that are vital to me. I couldn't put them in
my other work. How could I? It would have seemed--you will think me
ridiculous--a kind of prostitution."

"Yes," I said.

"But they were clamouring for expression all the time. And I have