Full Circle

I

GEOFFREY BETTON woke rather late--so late that the winter sunlight
sliding across his warm red carpet struck his eyes as he turned on
the pillow.

Strett, the valet, had been in, drawn the bath in the adjoining
dressing-room, placed the crystal and silver cigarette-box at his
side, put a match to the fire, and thrown open the windows to the
bright morning air. It brought in, on the glitter of sun, all the
shrill crisp morning noises--those piercing notes of the American
thoroughfare that seem to take a sharper vibration from the
clearness of the medium through which they pass.

Betton raised himself languidly. That was the voice of Fifth Avenue
below his windows. He remembered that when he moved into his rooms
eighteen months before, the sound had been like music to him: the
complex orchestration to which the tune of his new life was set. Now
it filled him with horror and weariness, since it had become the
symbol of the hurry and noise of that new life. He had been far less
hurried in the old days when he had to be up by seven, and down at
the office sharp at nine. Now that he got up when he chose, and his
life had no fixed framework of duties, the hours hunted him like a
pack of blood-hounds.

He dropped back on his pillows with a groan. Yes--not a year ago
there had been a positively sensuous joy in getting out of bed,
feeling under his bare feet the softness of the sunlit carpet, and
entering the shining tiled sanctuary where his great porcelain bath
proffered its renovating flood. But then a year ago he could still
call up the horror of the communal plunge at his earlier lodgings:
the listening for other bathers, the dodging of shrouded ladies in
"crimping"-pins, the cold wait on the landing, the reluctant descent
into a blotchy tin bath, and the effort to identify one's soap and
nail-brush among the promiscuous implements of ablution. That memory
had faded now, and Betton saw only the dark hours to which his blue
and white temple of refreshment formed a kind of glittering
antechamber. For after his bath came his breakfast, and on the
breakfast-tray his letters. His letters!

He remembered--and _that_ memory had not faded!--the thrill with
which he had opened the first missive in a strange feminine hand:
the letter beginning: "I wonder if you'll mind an unknown reader's
telling you all that your book has been to her?"

_ Mind?_ Ye gods, he minded now! For more than a year after the
publication of "Diadems and Faggots" the letters, the inane
indiscriminate letters of condemnation, of criticism, of
interrogation, had poured in on him by every post. Hundreds of
unknown readers had told him with unsparing detail all that his book