The days slipped along, and he slept eight hours regularly every night.  Though now, while waiting for more checks, he ate in the Japanese restaurants where meals were served for ten cents, his wasted body filled out, as did the hollows in his cheeks.  He no longer abused himself with short sleep, overwork, and overstudy.  He wrote nothing, and the books were closed.  He walked much, out in the hills, and loafed long hours in the quiet parks.  He had no friends nor acquaintances, nor did he make any.  He had no inclination.  He was waiting for some impulse, from he knew not where, to put his stopped life into motion again.  In the meantime his life remained run down, planless, and empty and idle.

Once he made a trip to San Francisco to look up the “real dirt.”  But at the last moment, as he stepped into the upstairs entrance, he recoiled and turned and fled through the swarming ghetto.  He was frightened at the thought of hearing philosophy discussed, and he fled furtively, for fear that some one of the “real dirt” might chance along and recognize him.

Sometimes he glanced over the magazines and newspapers to see how “Ephemera” was being maltreated.  It had made a hit.  But what a hit!  Everybody had read it, and everybody was discussing whether or not it was really poetry.  The local papers had taken it up, and daily there appeared columns of learned criticisms, facetious editorials, and serious letters from subscribers.  Helen Della Delmar (proclaimed with a flourish of trumpets and rolling of tomtoms to be the greatest woman poet in the United States) denied Brissenden a seat beside her on Pegasus and wrote voluminous letters to the public, proving that he was no poet.

The Parthenon came out in its next number patting itself on the back for the stir it had made, sneering at Sir John Value, and exploiting Brissenden’s death with ruthless commercialism.  A newspaper with a sworn circulation of half a million published an original and spontaneous poem by Helen Della Delmar, in which she gibed and sneered at Brissenden.  Also, she was guilty of a second poem, in which she parodied him.

Martin had many times to be glad that Brissenden was dead.  He had hated the crowd so, and here all that was finest and most sacred of him had been thrown to the crowd.  Daily the vivisection of Beauty went on.  Every nincompoop in the land rushed into free print, floating their wizened little egos into the public eye on the surge of Brissenden’s greatness.  Quoth one paper:  “We have received a letter from a gentleman who wrote a poem just like it, only better, some time ago.”  Another paper, in deadly seriousness, reproving Helen Della Delmar for her parody, said:  “But unquestionably Miss Delmar wrote it in a moment of badinage and not quite with the respect that one great poet should show to another and perhaps to the greatest.  However, whether Miss Delmar be jealous or not of the man who invented ‘Ephemera,’ it is certain that she, like thousands of others, is fascinated by his work, and that the day may come when she will try to write lines like his.”