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Updated: June 22, 2025
There've been no letters the last day or two," he explained. 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.
"There are very few to-day," said Vyse, with his irritating evasiveness; and Betton rejoined squarely: "Oh, they'll stop soon. The book's a failure." A few mornings later he felt a rush of shame at his own tergiversations, and stalked into the library with Vyse's sentence on his tongue. Vyse started back with one of his anaemic blushes. "I was hoping you'd be in. I wanted to speak to you.
"The way you differentiated your people characterised them avoided my stupid mistake of making the women's letters too short and logical, of letting my different correspondents use the same expressions: the amount of ingenuity and art you wasted on it! I swear, Vyse, I'm sorry that damned post-office went back on you," Betton went on, piling up the waves of his irony.
Glad you looked me up, my dear fellow." Vyse's palm was damp and bony: he had always had a disagreeable hand. "You got my note? You know what I've come for?" he said. "About the secretaryship? Betton lowered himself luxuriously into one of his vast Maple arm-chairs. He had grown stouter in the last year, and the cushion behind him fitted comfortably into the crease of his nape.
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.
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!
Betton minded it a good deal more than he had expected, but not nearly as much as he minded Vyse's knowing it. That remained the central twinge in his diffused discomfort. And the problem of getting rid of his secretary once more engaged him. "If I ship him now he'll think it's because I'm ashamed to have him see that I'm not getting any more letters."
"Not even the worst twaddle about my book?" he suggested lightly, pushing the papers about. "Nothing. I understood you wanted to go over them all first." "Well, perhaps it's safer," Betton conceded, as if the idea were new to him. With an embarrassed hand he continued to turn over the letters at Vyse's elbow.
"A lot to-day," Vyse told him cheerfully. His tone irritated Betton: it had the inane optimism of the physician reassuring a discouraged patient. "Oh, Lord I thought it was almost over," groaned the novelist. "No: they've just got their second wind. Here's one from a Chicago publisher never heard the name offering you thirty per cent. on your next novel, with an advance royalty of twenty thousand.
In an epistle to his friend Betton, high sheriff of the county, who had sent to him for a peck of seed corn, he says: "Soon plantin' time will come again, Syne may the heavens gie us rain, An' shining heat to bless ilk plain An' fertile hill, An' gar the loads o' yellow grain, Our garrets fill.
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