“I certainly was, a moment ago.  The prejudice of early youth, you know.  I learned such things then, and they cheapen what I have since learned.  They are the skeletons in my particular closet.”

“But you’ve got the door shut on them now?”

“I certainly have.”

“Sure?”

“Sure.”

“Then let’s go and get something to eat.”

“I’ll go you,” Martin answered, attempting to pay for the current Scotch and soda with the last change from his two dollars and seeing the waiter bullied by Brissenden into putting that change back on the table.

Martin pocketed it with a grimace, and felt for a moment the kindly weight of Brissenden’s hand upon his shoulder.

CHAPTER XXXII

Promptly, the next afternoon, Maria was excited by Martin’s second visitor.  But she did not lose her head this time, for she seated Brissenden in her parlor’s grandeur of respectability.

“Hope you don’t mind my coming?” Brissenden began.

“No, no, not at all,” Martin answered, shaking hands and waving him to the solitary chair, himself taking to the bed.  “But how did you know where I lived?”

“Called up the Morses.  Miss Morse answered the ’phone.  And here I am.”  He tugged at his coat pocket and flung a thin volume on the table.  “There’s a book, by a poet.  Read it and keep it.”  And then, in reply to Martin’s protest:  “What have I to do with books?  I had another hemorrhage this morning.  Got any whiskey?  No, of course not.  Wait a minute.”

He was off and away.  Martin watched his long figure go down the outside steps, and, on turning to close the gate, noted with a pang the shoulders, which had once been broad, drawn in now over, the collapsed ruin of the chest.  Martin got two tumblers, and fell to reading the book of verse, Henry Vaughn Marlow’s latest collection.

“No Scotch,” Brissenden announced on his return.  “The beggar sells nothing but American whiskey.  But here’s a quart of it.”

“I’ll send one of the youngsters for lemons, and we’ll make a toddy,” Martin offered.

“I wonder what a book like that will earn Marlow?” he went on, holding up the volume in question.

“Possibly fifty dollars,” came the answer.  “Though he’s lucky if he pulls even on it, or if he can inveigle a publisher to risk bringing it out.”

“Then one can’t make a living out of poetry?”

Martin’s tone and face alike showed his dejection.

“Certainly not.  What fool expects to?  Out of rhyming, yes.  There’s Bruce, and Virginia Spring, and Sedgwick.  They do very nicely.  But poetry—­do you know how Vaughn Marlow makes his living?—­teaching in a boys’ cramming-joint down in Pennsylvania, and of all private little hells such a billet is the limit.  I wouldn’t trade places with him if he had fifty years of life before him.  And yet his work stands out from the ruck of the contemporary versifiers as a balas ruby among carrots.  And the reviews he gets!  Damn them, all of them, the crass manikins!”