and stared at him incredulously. She exclaimed in a rather hushed voice: "Poetry? A disgrace?"
"Well, not so bad as that, perhaps," said Eden, hurriedly. "But a handicap to a fellow—something to be lived down."
"But are they not proud of you?"
"Y-Yes. My sister is. But she doesn't know anything about poetry. And one of my uncles. But he's quite old. Reads nothing this side of Shakespeare."
"And your parents? Your mother?" It seemed to her that he must have a mother to adore him.
"Both dead," he replied, and he added: "My brothers really despise me for it. There is a military tradition in our family."
She asked: "Were you through the War?"
"No. I was only seventeen when peace came."
"Oh, how stupid I am! Of course you were too young."
She began then to talk about his poetry. Eden forgot that he was in a reception room of a publisher's office. He forgot everything except his pleasure in her gracious, self-possessed, yet somehow shy presence. He heard himself talking, reciting bits of his poems—he had caught something of the Oxford intonation from his uncles—saying beautiful and mournful things that would have made Renny wince with shame for him, could he have overheard.
A stenographer came to announce that Mr. Cory would see Mr. Whiteoak. They arose, and looking down on her, he thought he had never seen such smooth, shining hair. It was coiled about her head like bands of shimmering satin.
He followed the stenographer to Mr. Cory's private room, and was given a tense handshake and a tenser scrutiny by the publisher.
