drama and to practise economy.

He had, indeed, provided for everything in his future, he was to
discover a little later, except for the affable condescension of Mrs.
Peachey toward the profession of letters. Cyrus's antagonism he had
attributed to the crass stupidity of the commercial mind; but it was a
blow to him to encounter the same misconception, more discreetly veiled,
in a woman of the charm and the character of Mrs. Peachey. Bland, plump,
and pretty, she received the modest avowal of his occupation with the
smiling skepticism peculiar to a race whose genius has been chiefly
military.

"I understand--it is very interesting," she observed sweetly. "But what
do you do besides--what do you do, I mean, for a living?"

Here it was again, this fatuous intolerance! this incomprehensible
provincialism! And the terrible part of it was that he had suddenly the
sensation of being overwhelmed by the weight of it, of being smothered
under a mountain of prejudice. The flame of his anger against Cyrus went
out abruptly, leaving him cold. It was the world now against which he
rebelled. He felt that the whole world was provincial.

"I shall write reviews for a New York paper," he answered, trying in
vain to impress her by a touch of literary hauteur. At the moment it
seemed to him that he could cheerfully bear anything if they would only
at least pretend to take him seriously. What appalled him was not the
opposition, but the utter absence of comprehension. And he could never
hope to convince them! Even if he were to write great plays, they would
still hold as obstinately by their assumption that the writing of plays
did not matter--that what really mattered was to create and then to
satisfy an inordinate appetite for tobacco. This was authentic success,
and by no illegitimate triumph of genius could he persuade an industrial
country that he was as great a man as his uncle. The smiling incredulity
in Mrs. Peachey's face ceased to be individual and became a part of the
American attitude toward the native-born artist. This attitude, he
admitted, was not confined to Dinwiddie, since it was national. He had
encountered it in New York, but never had the destructive force of it
impressed him as it did on the ripe and charming lips of the woman
before him. In that illuminating instant he understood why the American
consciousness in literature was still unawakened, why the creative
artist turned manufacturer, why the original thinke