Betton raised himself languidly.  That was the voice of Fifth Avenue below his windows.  He remembered that when he moved into his rooms eighteen months before, the sound had been like music to him:  the complex orchestration to which the tune of his new life was set.  Now it filled him with horror and weariness, since it had become the symbol of the hurry and noise of that new life.  He had been far less hurried in the old days when he had to be up by seven, and down at the office sharp at nine.  Now that he got up when he chose, and his life had no fixed framework of duties, the hours hunted him like a pack of blood-hounds.

He dropped back on his pillows with a groan.  Yes—­not a year ago there had been a positively sensuous joy in getting out of bed, feeling under his bare feet the softness of the sunlit carpet, and entering the shining tiled sanctuary where his great porcelain bath proffered its renovating flood.  But then a year ago he could still call up the horror of the communal plunge at his earlier lodgings:  the listening for other bathers, the dodging of shrouded ladies in “crimping"-pins, the cold wait on the landing, the reluctant descent into a blotchy tin bath, and the effort to identify one’s soap and nail-brush among the promiscuous implements of ablution.  That memory had faded now, and Betton saw only the dark hours to which his blue and white temple of refreshment formed a kind of glittering antechamber.  For after his bath came his breakfast, and on the breakfast-tray his letters.  His letters!

He remembered—­and that memory had not faded!—­the thrill with which he had opened the first missive in a strange feminine hand:  the letter beginning:  “I wonder if you’ll mind an unknown reader’s telling you all that your book has been to her?”

_ Mind?_ Ye gods, he minded now!  For more than a year after the publication of “Diadems and Faggots” the letters, the inane indiscriminate letters of condemnation, of criticism, of interrogation, had poured in on him by every post.  Hundreds of unknown readers had told him with unsparing detail all that his book had been to them.  And the wonder of it was, when all was said and done, that it had really been so little—­that when their thick broth of praise was strained through the author’s anxious vanity there remained to him so small a sediment of definite specific understanding!  No—­it was always the same thing, over and over and over again—­the same vague gush of adjectives, the same incorrigible tendency to estimate his effort according to each writer’s personal preferences, instead of regarding it as a work of art, a thing to be measured by objective standards!