Hudson River Bracketed by Edith Wharton

Laura Lou's convalescence was slow, her illness expensive. Upton, appealed to by Mrs. Tracy, said all his savings had gone into buying a Ford, and he could do nothing for them for the present. Vance knew that his mother-in-law expected his family to come to his aid. She ascribed Laura Lou's illness to his imprudence, and felt that, since his endless scribbling brought in so little, he ought to get help from home. But Vance could not bring himself to ask for money, and his reports of Laura Lou's illness produced only letters of sympathy from his mother and grandmother, and knitted bed jackets from the girls. His father wrote that times were bad in real estate, and offered again to try and get him a job on the Free Speaker if he would come back to live at Euphoria. And there the matter ended.

At odds with himself, he ground out a dull article on "The New Poetry," the result of random reading among the works of the Cocoanut Tree poets; but it satisfied neither him nor the poets. He tried to make a plan for Loot, but it crumbled to nothing. He was too ignorant of that tumultuous metropolitan world to picture it except through other eyes. If he could have lived in it for a while, if somebody like Mrs. Tarrant had let him into its secrets, perhaps he could have made a book of it; but anything he did unaided would have to be borrowed from other books. Besides, he did not want to denounce or to show up, as most of the "society" novelists did, but to take apart the works of the machine, and find out what all those people behind the splendid house fronts signified in the general scheme of things. Until he understood that, he couldn't write about them. He brought his difficulty to Eric Rauch. "Unless I can think their thoughts it's no use," he said. Rauch looked puzzled, and seemed to regard the difficulty as an imaginary one. "Funny to me you can't get hold of a subject," he said; and Vance rejoined: "Oh, but I can--hundreds; they swarm. Only they're all subjects I don't know enough about to tackle them." "Well, I guess you're in the doldrums," Rauch commented; and the talk ended.