Betton drew a quick breath of relief.  The man had some sense of decency, then!  He meant to dismiss himself.

“I told you so, my dear fellow; the book’s a flat failure,” he said, almost gaily.

Vyse made a deprecating gesture.  “I don’t know that I should regard the absence of letters as the ultimate test.  But I wanted to ask you if there isn’t something else I can do on the days when there’s no writing.”  He turned his glance toward the book-lined walls.  “Don’t you want your library catalogued?” he asked insidiously.

“Had it done last year, thanks.”  Betton glanced away from Vyse’s face.  It was piteous, how he needed the job!

“I see. ...  Of course this is just a temporary lull in the letters.  They’ll begin again—­as they did before.  The people who read carefully read slowly—­you haven’t heard yet what they think.”

Betton felt a rush of puerile joy at the suggestion.  Actually, he hadn’t thought of that!

“There was a big second crop after ‘Diadems and Faggots,’” he mused aloud.

“Of course.  Wait and see,” said Vyse confidently.

The letters in fact began again—­more gradually and in smaller numbers.  But their quality was different, as Vyse had predicted.  And in two cases Betton’s correspondents, not content to compress into one rapid communication the thoughts inspired by his work, developed their views in a succession of really remarkable letters.  One of the writers was a professor in a Western college; the other was a girl in Florida.  In their language, their point of view, their reasons for appreciating “Abundance,” they differed almost diametrically; but this only made the unanimity of their approval the more striking.  The rush of correspondence evoked by Betton’s earlier novel had produced nothing so personal, so exceptional as these communications.  He had gulped the praise of “Diadems and Faggots” as undiscriminatingly as it was offered; now he knew for the first time the subtler pleasures of the palate.  He tried to feign indifference, even to himself; and to Vyse he made no sign.  But gradually he felt a desire to know what his secretary thought of the letters, and, above all, what he was saying in reply to them.  And he resented acutely the possibility of Vyse’s starting one of his clandestine correspondences with the girl in Florida.  Vyse’s notorious lack of delicacy had never been more vividly present to Betton’s imagination; and he made up his mind to answer the letters himself.

He would keep Vyse on, of course:  there were other communications that the secretary could attend to.  And, if necessary, Betton would invent an occupation:  he cursed his stupidity in having betrayed the fact that his books were already catalogued.

Vyse showed no surprise when Betton announced his intention of dealing personally with the two correspondents who showed so flattering a reluctance to take their leave.  But Betton immediately read a criticism in his lack of comment, and put forth, on a note of challenge:  “After all, one must be decent!”