His words, and even more his look, remained with Trent long afterwards, blowing, like a fresh strong wind, through the hours of despondency which followed for him upon any temporary exaltation.  The young man had a trick of remembering faces, not as wearing their accustomed daily look, but as he had seen them animated and transfigured by any vivid moment of experience, and he found later that when he thought of Adams it was to recall the instant’s kindly lighting of the eyes, the flicker of courageous humour about the mouth and the dauntless ring in the usually quiet voice.  He realised now, as he walked through the humming streets, that success or failure is not an abstract quantity but a relative value—­that a man may be a shining success in the world’s eyes and a comparative failure in his own.  To Trent, Adams had for years represented the cultured and scholarly critic—­the writer who, in his limited individual field, had incontestably “arrived.”  Now, for the first time, he saw that the editor looked upon himself as a man of small achievements, and that, inasmuch as his idea had been vastly more than his execution, he felt himself to belong to the unfulfilled ones of the earth.

When, a little later, he reached Mrs. Bridewell’s house in Sixty-ninth Street the servant invited him, after a moment’s wait below, into her sitting-room upstairs, and, following the man’s lead, he was finally ushered into a charming apartment upon the second floor.  A light cloud of cigarette smoke trailed toward him as he entered, and when he paused, confused by broken little peals of laughter, he made out a group of ladies gathered about a tiny Oriental table upon which stood a tray of Turkish coffee.  Gerty rose from the circle as he advanced, and moved a single step forward, while the pale green flounces of her train rippled prettily about her feet.  Her hair was loosely arranged, and she gave him an odd impression of wearing what in his provincial mind he called a “wrapper”—­his homely name for the exquisite garment which flowed, straight and unconfined, from her slender shoulders.  His mother, he remembered, not without a saving humour, had always insisted that a lady should appear before the opposite sex only in the entire armour of her “stays” and close-fitting bodice.

Gerty, as she mentioned the names of her callers, subsided with her ebbing green waves into the chair from which she had risen, and held her cigarette toward Trent with a pretty inviting gesture.  Her delicate grace gave the pose a piquant attraction, and he found himself watching with delight the tiny rings of smoke which curled presently from her parted lips.  As she smoked she held her chin slightly lifted, and regarded him from beneath lowered lids with an arch and careless humour.

“If you’d been the Pope himself,” she remarked, as an indifferent apology, “I’d hardly have done more than fling the table-cover over my head.  Even you, after you’d spent a morning trying on a velvet gown, would require a lounge and a good smoke.”