Chapter 14 - Page 2

about any of our little social sign-posts," said
Archer, with a secret pride in his own picture of her.

"H'm--been in bigger places, I suppose," the other
commented. "Well, here's my corner."

He slouched off across Broadway, and Archer stood
looking after him and musing on his last words.

Ned Winsett had those flashes of penetration; they
were the most interesting thing about him, and always
made Archer wonder why they had allowed him to
accept failure so stolidly at an age when most men are
still struggling.

Archer had known that Winsett had a wife and
child, but he had never seen them. The two men always
met at the Century, or at some haunt of journalists and
theatrical people, such as the restaurant where Winsett
had proposed to go for a bock. He had given Archer to
understand that his wife was an invalid; which 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 Winsett's 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 journalist's 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 women's 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 Winsett's, after all,
contained still less,