Cairns was arranging a little party for his friend.  In the meantime, his productive quantity sank from torrent to trickle.  His secretary, who knew the processes of the writer’s mind as the keys of his machine, and had adjusted his own brain to them through many brisk sessions, fell now through empty space.  He had no resources in this room, where he had been driven so long by the mental force of another.  Having suffered himself to be played upon, like the instrument before him, he died many deaths from ennui....  So Cairns and the secretary stared helplessly at each other across the emptiness; and New York rushed on, with its mad business, singing spitefully in their ears:  “You for the poor-farms.  You’ll lose your front, and your markets.  Your income is suffering; the presses are waiting; editors dependent....”

Cairns left the house on the third morning after Bedient’s coming, having dictated two or three letters....  Bedient was across the street from the Smilax Club in the little fenced-in park—­Gramercy.  Cairns told his work-difficulty.

“Don’t you think it would be good for you, David,” Bedient asked, “to let the subconscious catch up?”

Cairns was interested at once.  “What do you mean?”

“I’ve been thinking more than a little about you and New York.  One thing is sure:  New York is pretty much wrong, or I’m insane——­”

“You’re happy about it,” Cairns remarked.  “Tell me the worst.”

“People here use their reflectors and not their generators,” Bedient said.  “They shine with another’s light, when they should be incandescent.  The brain in your skull, in any man’s skull, is but a reflector, an instrument of his deeper mind.  There’s your genius, infinitely wiser than your brain.  It’s your sun; your brain, the moon.  All great work comes from the subconscious mind.  You and New York use too much moonshine.”

Both men were smiling, but to Cairns, nevertheless, it seemed that his own conscience had awakened after a long sleep.  This wanderer from the seas had twigged the brain brass which he had long been passing for gold value.  He saw many bits of his recent work, as products of intellectual foppery.  He recalled a letter recently received from an editor; which read:  “That last article of yours has caught on.  Do six more like it.”  He hadn’t felt the stab before.  He had done the six—­multiplied his original idea by mechanical means....

All things considered, it was rather an important affair—­the party that night at the Smilax Club.  Cairns began with the idea of asking ten people, but the more he studied Bedient’s effect upon himself, the more particular he became about the “atmosphere.”  Just the men he wanted were out of reach, so he asked none at all, but five women.  Four of these he would have grouped into a sentence as “the most interesting women in New York,” and the fifth was a romantic novelty in a minor key, sort of “in the air” at the Club.