Hartley winced a little and remained silent.
"It wouldn't have taken you long to find out what a lot of fakirs we are. Don't look shocked--fakirs is the only word; I'm one myself."
"Fifteen years ago I was earnest, ambitious, penniless, and proud-spirited. I imagined I was going to write the great American novel. Now I'm a silly, egotistical, spoiled old woman, writing advertisements for a Brooklyn soap-maker, publishing Sunday-school stories under seven different names, grinding out short stories and verses that I despise, and concocting a novel now and then that I abominate! That is the crown of thorns the city puts on your head. If I'd only stayed out in my little Wisconsin village, and gone hungry, and been unhappy, and waited, some day I might have written my great book!"
"Then why not go back, and wait, and be unhappy, and hungry, even, and write it?"
"It's too late; I can't. And that's the worst of it all. You see that bent, tired-looking old man sitting by the woman in gray? Well, he's the editor of 'The Republic.' For twenty years now he's been talking about the little peach-farm he's going to buy somewhere back in the New Jersey hills. He's never done it, poor old fellow! And he'll never do it. That's only his _fata morgana_, for he's foredoomed to die in harness. He couldn't break away from this life if he wanted to; he'd get homesick for the glare and noise and rush and rattle of it in a week, and perish of loneliness. But still he goes grinding away, dreaming about his peach-farm among the hills, and putting it continually off for one year more, and then still one year more. But there--you're beginning to think I'm a regular Jeremiah wailing in the desert of American mediocrity, so I'm going to leave you here alone to think it all over."
From the shadowy quietness of his window-seat Hartley looked out on the shifting, bewildering scene before him, a panorama of movement and color and energy that seemed to lose none of its unrest as midnight approached and waned. The young Oxonian felt that it was all a more or less disturbing glimpse of a new world that was opening up before him. He seemed able to catch at no order or meaning in the trend of it. At his Old World university, and in London itself, he had come more or less in touch with many of the great men of his age. About these Old World men there had always seemed to be an atmosphere--an almost repellent atmosphere--of academic calm, of intellectual reserve. When need be, they seemed able to surround themselves with a cuttlefish cloud of austerity. At that late day, a little to his distress, he was learning that eminence was not always august, that now and then even a lion could gambol. He wondered, in his perplexity, if it was some unexpected and belated blossoming of American humor, of that American humor which still so puzzled him. He did not condemn what seemed the eternal facetiousness of the American--he was still too avid of impression and too open-minded for that--but it disquieted him, and made him feel ill at ease.
