Vyse looked at him with an evanescent smile.  “You’ll have to explain that you didn’t write the first answers.”

Betton halted.  “Well—­I—­I more or less dictated them, didn’t I?”

“Oh, virtually, they’re yours, of course.”

“You think I can put it that way?”

“Why not?” The secretary absently drew an arabesque on the blotting-pad.  “Of course they’ll keep it up longer if you write yourself,” he suggested.

Betton blushed, but faced the issue.  “Hang it all, I sha’n’t be sorry.  They interest me.  They’re remarkable letters.”  And Vyse, without observation, returned to his writings.

The spring, that year, was delicious to Betton.  His college professor continued to address him tersely but cogently at fixed intervals, and twice a week eight serried pages came from Florida.  There were other letters, too; he had the solace of feeling that at last “Abundance” was making its way, was reaching the people who, as Vyse said, read slowly because they read intelligently.  But welcome as were all these proofs of his restored authority they were but the background of his happiness.  His life revolved for the moment about the personality of his two chief correspondents.  The professor’s letters satisfied his craving for intellectual recognition, and the satisfaction he felt in them proved how completely he had lost faith in himself.  He blushed to think that his opinion of his work had been swayed by the shallow judgments of a public whose taste he despised.  Was it possible that he had allowed himself to think less well of “Abundance” because it was not to the taste of the average novel-reader?  Such false humility was less excusable than the crudest appetite for praise:  it was ridiculous to try to do conscientious work if one’s self-esteem were at the mercy of popular judgments.  All this the professor’s letters delicately and indirectly conveyed to Betton, with the result that the author of “Abundance” began to recognize in it the ripest flower of his genius.

But if the professor understood his book, the girl in Florida understood him; and Betton was fully alive to the superior qualities of discernment which this process implied.  For his lovely correspondent his novel was but the starting-point, the pretext of her discourse:  he himself was her real object, and he had the delicious sense, as their exchange of thoughts proceeded, that she was interested in “Abundance” because of its author, rather than in the author because of his book.  Of course she laid stress on the fact that his ideas were the object of her contemplation; but Betton’s agreeable person had permitted him some insight into the incorrigible subjectiveness of female judgments, and he was pleasantly aware, from the lady’s tone, that she guessed him to be neither old nor ridiculous.  And suddenly he wrote to ask if he might see her. ...

The answer was long in coming.  Betton fumed at the delay, watched, wondered, fretted; then he received the one word “Impossible.”