“The luncheon was interesting.  Bedient and Ritchold got together beautifully.  The talk was brisk and big, just occasionally cutting the edges of shop.  Both men came to me afterward.  ’Splendid chap, your friend,’ Ritchold said.  ’A man who has seen so much and can talk so well, ought to write.  Thanks for meeting him.’

“‘I was very glad to meet Mr. Ritchold,’ Bedient remarked later—­hours later—­after I had given up hope of hearing on the subject.  ’I think he shows where one trouble lies....  It’s in him and his kind, David.  His periodical sells to the great number.  He is a very bright man, and his art is in knowing what the great number wants.  Being brighter, and of finer discernment, than those who buy his product, he debases his taste to make his organs relish the coarser article.  That’s the first evil—­prostituting himself....  Now a people glutted with what it wants is a stagnant people.  Its only hope is in such men as Ritchold leading them to the higher ways.  In refusing, he wrongs the public—­the second evil....  Again, in blunting his own sensibilities and catering to the common, he stands as a barrier between the public and real creative energy.  He and the public are one.  A prostituted taste and a stagnant popular mind are alike repelled by reality.  Rousing creative power glances from them both.  So his third evil is the busheling and harrying of genius....  There he stands, forcing genius to be common, to appear, paying well and swiftly only for that which is common.  Genius writhes a bit, starves a bit, but the terrible needs of this complicated life have him by the throat until he cries “Enough,” and presently is common, indeed.’”

“He need not have spoken of writing only,” Beth remarked. “They must have taught him to see things clearly in the Orient....  You know, David, I found it hard last night, and a little now, to fix his point of view and his power to express it, with the life of outdoor men, the ‘enlisted,’ as he says, rather than the ‘commissioned’ folk of this world.”

“He has done much reading, but more thinking,” Cairns declared.  “He has been much alone, and he has lived.  He sees inside.  ’The great books of the world are little books,’ he said recently, ’books that a pocket or a haversack will hold.  You don’t realize what they have given you, until you sit down in a roomful of ordinary books and see how tame and common the quantities are.’  And it’s true.  Look at the big men of few books.  They learned to look inside of books they had!  He knows the Bible, and the Bhagavad Gita.”

“Oh, I’m beginning to understand,” Beth exclaimed.  “Nights alone with the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, and one’s schooldays—­a weathering from the open and seasoning from the seas.  Men have such chances to learn the perils and passions of the earth, but so few do....  I see it now.  It isn’t remarkable that we find him poised and finished, but that he should have had the inclination naturally—­a child among sailors—­for the great little books of the world, and through them and his nights alone, to have kept his balance and builded his power.”