“But if, as you say, her emotional self does not go into her poems, what becomes of it?” enquired Trent, with a curiosity too impersonal to be vulgar.  “For she, finely tempered as she is, suggests nothing so much as a beautiful golden flame.”

Adams started, and flashed upon the other a glance as incisive as a search-light.

“Then you, too, recognise her beauty?” he asked in a tone which had a kindly jealousy.

“Am I a fool?” protested Trent, laughing.

’You heard Kemper?”

“I heard him proclaim himself an ass.  Well, let him, let him.  Would you hand out one of your precious first editions to the crowd?”

“You’re right, you’re right,” assented Adams, and followed his remark with a sudden change of subject.  “I am interested, Mr. Trent, in what you yourself have come to do.”

“I—­Oh, I have done nothing,” declared Trent.

“In your aims, then, let us say, I understand that you intend to try the drama?”

“Well, I confess to having done a play that I think isn’t bad,” replied Trent, blushing over all his fresh, smooth-shaven face.  “Benson has promised me a hearing.”

“Ah, I know him—­he’s always eager for new blood.  Perhaps you wouldn’t mind my speaking a word or two to him?

“Mind!” exclaimed the younger man, his voice shaking.  “Why, I can’t tell you how happy it would make me.”

They had reached Eighteenth Street, and Trent paused a moment on the corner before turning off to the big red-brick apartment house where he was temporarily placed.  “I’d like to walk up to Thirty-fifth with you,” he added, “but my mother is expecting me and it makes her nervous when I stay out after dark.  She’s just from the country, you know, and she gets confused by the noise.”  He hesitated an instant and then finished with embarrassment.  “I wish so much that she could know you.’

“It is a pleasure I hope for very shortly,” responded Adams.  “How does she like New York, by the way?”

Under the electric light Trent’s eyes seemed to run entirely to sparkles.  “Ah, well, it’s rather lonely for her.  She misses the callers at home who used to come to spend the day.”

“We must try to change that,” said the other as he moved off, while Trent noted that despite his genial sympathy of manner there had been no mention of Mrs. Adams.  Where was she? and what was she? questioned the younger man in perplexity, as he crossed to his apartment house at the corner of Fourth Avenue.

At Twenty-third Street Adams had turned almost unconsciously into Fifth Avenue, for so detached was the intellectual remoteness in which he lived that he might have been, for all his immediate perceptions of his surroundings, strolling at dusk along a deserted Western road.  He was so used to dwelling on the cool heights of a dearly bought, a hardly wrung, philosophy that he had become at last almost oblivious of the mere external