Eden found that his steps made no noise on the thick rug that covered the floor of the reception room of the New York publishing firm of Cory and Parsons, so he could pace up and down as restlessly as he liked without fear of attracting attention. He was horribly nervous. He had a sensation in his stomach that was akin to hunger, yet his throat felt so oddly constricted that to swallow would have been impossible.
A mirror in a carved frame gave him, when he hesitated before it, a greenish reflection of himself that was not reassuring. He wished he had not got such a brazen coat of tan in the North that summer. These New Yorkers would surely look on him as a Canadian backwoodsman. His hands, as he grasped the package containing his new manuscript, were almost black, it seemed to him, and no wonder, for he had been paddling and camping among the Northern lakes for months. He decided to lay the manuscript on a table, picking it up at the last minute before he entered Mr. Cory's private office. It had been Mr. Cory with whom he had corresponded about his poems, who had expressed himself as eager to read the long narrative poem composed that summer. For the book published in midsummer was being well reviewed, American critics finding an agreeable freshness and music in Eden's lyrics. As books of poems went, it had had a fair sale. The young poet would get enough out of it perhaps to buy himself a new winter overcoat. He stood now, tall and slender in his loosely fitting tweeds, very British-looking, feeling that this solemn, luxurious room
