Madam Sapphira by Edgar Saltus

A week passed. Once Nevius read of his wife's presence at the country club to which she had gone, and once she wrote. But the letter was brief, relating mainly to household affairs and conveying but meager details as to the writer's occupation and environments.

Meanwhile Miss Adulam had been almost as good as her word. She had dined at Tenth Street twice and on the intervening Sunday had lunched there as well.

On that evening Nevius dined with Michette. The cat was loquacious, but its loquacity was not of the interruptive order, and as it monologued interminably on what seemed to be the same subject, Nevius felt bored. As a relief, the cloth removed, he wrote to his wife.

That pleasure at an end, the boredom returned, loneliness as well, and for companionship's sake he looked in at the Athenaeum club where he ran into Alphabet Jones and managed to kill an hour.

"I hear you are making money," the novelist between two whiffs remarked. "I hear you have enough to burn."

"I wish I had. No, I may have to go to Chicago in a day or two, I am afraid even that I may have to go abroad."

"It wouldn't frighten me a bit if I had to. Will your princess go too?"

"Oh, of course. " And Nevius nodded with an air of assured conviction. "But how is the Muse? What are you writing now?"

"Cheques, dear boy," Jones answered negligently. "Cheques, that's all."

"I thought you had something on the stocks."

"Stocks is the word. The pillory comes later."

"Your books are too confounded cynical. Alphabet. The public don't like it."

"But did I invent human nature? " And the novelist looked at his friend with an air ruminant and bovine in its innocence.

"I don't believe," retorted Nevius, "I don't believe at all that it is human nature for women to act as they do in your books. Anyone might think that New York was peopled with demireps."

"Perhaps. But then you see everyone isn't blessed as you are."

"No, that's a fact, I admit. But even so, what is the use in choosing such subjects?"

"I choose a subject! Why, dear boy, a writer, if he happens to be worth his syndicate, never chooses a subject. The subject chooses him. He writes what he must, not what he might. That's a thing that the public can't understand. The secret of any work of value lies in the harmony existing between the subject and the author. And even then his one chance of success consists not only in yielding to the subject but in caressing it. Every artist knows that. Flaubert has rung his changes on it a thousand times.

"Oh, well, if you bring up your heavy artillery I surrender. After all I don't mean to abuse you."

"But I love to have you. The next time you have a moment skim over a history, and then come and tell me the name of one man of ability who has not been abused. And the greater the ability, the greater the abuse. It is the tribute that failure pays to success. Mediocrity is never discussed, and, being unforgiving, resents it. As for my books, if they please no one, doubtless they are poor, but if they pleased everybody I should consider them rot. Vox populi, vox stulti. The majority is always wrong. What would a Scotch and soda say to you?"

"That I am vile and vicious I suppose. No thanks. I think I will be getting home."