“You’re a dear boy——­” she began.

“No, I’m not, Beth.  Oh, it isn’t the only thing—­that has been rammed home to me.... Me; there’s so much me mixed up in my mind, so much tiresome and squalid me, that I wonder every decent person hasn’t cut me long since for a bore and a nuisance.  Why, I had become all puny and blinded—­my stomach, my desires, markets, memories, ambitions, doubts, rages, rights, poses and conceits.  I really need to tell some one, to unveil before some one who won’t wince, but treasure the little moral residuum——­”

“You have done well to come to Beth,” she said, leaning forward and patting his shoulder with the thin stem of her brush, though a woman always feels her years when a man brings woes such as these to her....  It was Beth’s weakness (or strength) that she could never reveal the intimacies of her heart.  Only sometimes in half-humorous generalities, she permitted things to escape, thinking no one understood.

“Thanks, Beth.  I’m grateful,” Cairns said.  “I seem to have missed for a long time the bigger dimension in people, books, pictures, faces, even in the heart.  It’s a long time since I set out this way, a down-grade, and the last few days, I’ve heard the rapids.  I’m going back, as far and as fast as I can up-stream.  And this is no lie; no pose.”

“I repeat, you’re a dear boy——­”

“Oh, it’s Bedient who jerked me up straight.  I’d have gone on....  And to think I made him wait over an hour, when he first called....  He’s the finest bit of man-stuff I’ve ever known, Beth.”

She found herself relieved, that he had given to the stranger the praise.

“...  And, Beth, if you want to dig for his views, you’ll get them.  He says New York plucks everything green; opinionates on the wing, makes personal capital out of another’s offering, refusing to wait for the fineness of impersonal judgment.  He asks nothing more stimulating than the capacity to say on occasion, ‘I don’t know,’ flat and unqualified.  He sees everywhere, the readiness to be clever instead of true.  So many New Yorkers, he says, are like fishes, that, knowing water, disclaim the possibility of air.

“You know, Beth, Bedient never encountered what America was thinking and reading, until a few months ago down on his Island.  We are editorialists in the writing game, he declares, what-shall-I-write-about-to-day-folks!  We don’t wait for fulness, but wear out brain thin bandying about what drops on it.  If we would wait until we were full men, we would have to write, and not drive ourselves to the work——­”

“Oh, I do believe that!” Beth said.  “We need to be reminded of that.”

“That we is very pretty, Beth,” Cairns went on. “...Such a queer finished incident happened yesterday.  I hunted up Bedient at noon, and we talked about some of these matters.  And then we met Ritchold for luncheon.  It was at Teuton’s.  I took Bedient aside and whispered with a flourish, ’One of our ten-thousand-a-year editors, Andrew.’...  ’What makes him worth that?’ he asked.  ‘He knows what the people want,’ I replied.  Can you see us, Beth?...