ourage me, Suzanna. I'd thought it rotten. What
are you working at?"

"I've just finished a paper on John Dewey for the _Atlantic_. I was so
proud when Witt said he hadn't a criticism to make. I'm on a review
for the _Yale_ now; and the new _Century_ has asked me for a
psychological analysis of the Younger Generation. I'm going to compare
our post-war product with all that is known of young people and their
manifestations straight back to the Stone Age. I've made a specialty
of the subject. Witt has helped me a lot in research. D'you think
he's gone off?"

"Gone off? Certainly not. Every columnist in town had something to
say about that last installment of his novel. Best thing he's ever
done, and that's saying all. He's strong as an ox, too. Why in
heaven's name should he go off?"

"Well, baby's teething and won't let any one else hold her when she
gets a fretting spell. He's been up a lot lately."

Clavering burst into a loud delighted laugh. He had forgotten his
personal affairs completely, as he always did when talking to this
remarkable little paradox. "Gad! That's good! And his public
visualizes him as a sort of Buddha, brooding cross-legged in his
library, receiving direct advice from the god of fiction. . . . But I
wouldn't have you otherwise. The nineteenth century bluestocking with
twentieth century trimmings. . . . What now?"

Rollo Landers Todd, the "Poet of Manhattan," had stalked in with a
Prussian helmet on his head, his girth draped in a rich blue shawl
embroidered and fringed with white, a bitter frown on his jovial round
face; and in his hand a long rod with a large blue bow on the metal
point designed to shut refractory windows. Helen Vane Baker, a
contribution from Society to the art of fiction, with flowing hair and
arrayed in a long nightgown over her dress, fortunately white, was
assisted to the top of the bookcase on the west wall. Henry Church, a
famous satirist, muffled in a fur cloak, a small black silk
handkerchief pinned about his lively face, stumped heavily into the
room, fell in a heap on the floor against the opposite wall, and in a
magnificent bass growled out the resentment of Ortrud, while a rising
but not yet prosilient pianist, with a long blonde wig from Miss
Dwight's property chest, threw his head back, shook his hands, adjusted
a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and banged out the prelude to
_Lohengrin_ with amazing variations. Elsa, with her pr