feet, can wear; while the old boys turned out shoes that anybody who can walk at all can wear—”
“Like overshoes,” the other suggested.
“Like overshoes,” Fairchild agreed. “But, then, I ain’t disparaging. Perhaps the few that the shoes fit can go a lot further than a whole herd of people shod alike could go.”
“Interesting, anyway,” the Semitic man said, “to reduce the spiritual progress of the race to terms of an emotional migration; esthetic Israelites crossing unwetted a pink sea of dullness and security. What about it, Eva?”
Mrs. Wiseman, thinking of Jenny’s soft body, came out of her dream. “I think you are both not only silly, but dull.” She rose. “I want to burn another cigarette, Dawson.”
He gave her one, and a match, and she left them. Fairchild turned a few pages. “It’s kind of difficult for me to reconcile her with this book,” he said slowly. “Does it strike you that way?”
“Not so much that she wrote this,” the other answered, “but that she wrote anything at all. That anybody should. But there’s no puzzle about the book itself. Not to me, that is. But you, straying trustfully about this park of dark and rootless trees which Dr. Ellis and your Germans have recently thrown open to the public . . . You'll always be a babe in that wood, you know. Bewildered, and slightly annoyed; restive, like Ashur-bani-pal’s stallion when his master mounted him.”
“Emotional bisexuality,” Fairchild said.
“Yes. But you are trying to reconcile the book and the author. A book is the writer’s secret life, the dark twin of a man: you can’t reconcile them. And with you, when the inevitable clash comes, the author’s actual self is the one that goes down, for you are of those for whom fact and fallacy gain verisimilitude by being in cold print.”
