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might be true of the poor lady, or might merely mean that she was lacking in social gifts or in evening clothes, or in both. Winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of social observances: Archer, who dressed in the evening because he thought it cleaner and more comfortable to do so, and who had never stopped to consider that cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items in a modest budget, regarded Winsetts attitude as part of the boring Bohemian pose that always made fashionable people, who changed their clothes without talking about it, and were not forever harping on the number of servants one kept, seem so much simpler and less self-conscious than the others. Nevertheless, he was always stimulated by Winsett, and whenever he caught sight of the journalists lean bearded face and melancholy eyes he would rout him out of his corner and carry him off for a long talk. Winsett was not a journalist by choice. He was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a womens weekly, where fashion- plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks. On the subject of Hearth-fires (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how little it contained; but Winsetts, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiosities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism. The fact is, life isnt much a fit for either of us, Winsett had once said. Im down and out; nothing to be done about it. Ive got only one ware to produce, and theres no market for it here, and wont be in my time. But youre free and youre well-off. Why dont you get into touch? Theres only one way to do it: to go into politics. Archer threw his head back and laughed. There one saw at a flash the unbridgeable difference between men like Winsett and the othersArchers kind. Every one in polite circles knew that, in America, a gentleman couldnt go into politics. But, since he could hardly put it in that way to Winsett, he answered evasively: Look at the career of the honest man in American politics! They dont want us. Whos they? Why dont you all get together and be they yourselves? Archers laugh lingered on his lips in a slightly condescending smile. It was useless to prolong the discussion: everybody knew the melancholy fate of the few gentlemen who had risked their clean linen in municipal or state politics in New York. The day was past when that sort of thing was possible: the country was in possession of the bosses and the emigrant, and decent people had to fall back on sport or culture. Culture! Yesif we had it! But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack ofwell, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them. But youre in a pitiful little minority: youve got no centre, no competition, no audience. Youre like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: The Portrait of a Gentleman. Youll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get right down into the muck. That, or emigrate . . . God! If I could emigrate . . . Archer mentally shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation back to books, where Winsett, if uncertain, was always interesting. Emigrate! As if a gentleman could abandon his own country! One could no more do that than one could roll up ones sleeves and go down into the muck. A gentleman simply stayed at home and abstained. But you couldnt make a man like Winsett see that; and that was why the New York of literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first shake made it seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out, in the end, to be a smaller box, with a more monotonous pattern, than the assembled atoms of Fifth Avenue. |
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