has
missed his failures. He has fought and been defeated but he has never
longed and been frustrated. In his case, romance is realism. He has only
known happy endings.

Naturally he is not an interesting writer. How could he be? And,
naturally, he is a successful one. How could he help it? Delancey writes
for magazines in England and America. I, myself, never read magazines,
but occasionally he sends me one and every twenty stories (I think it is
twenty) become a book. The English ones were about scapegraces and
irresistible ne'er-do-wells, ancestral homes with frayed carpets and
faded hangings in which penniless woman-haters (the last of a noble
line) sit and brood, living alone with equally gruff, woman-hating
family retainers. Sometimes, too, there was an absent-minded dreamer,
and villainous business men worked indefatigably in the interests of
their own ultimate frustration.

But this, of course, would never do for America where there isn't a
market for ne'er-do-wells, frayed carpets inspire no glamour, and
dreamers who before the war were despised as harmless, are now damned as
dangerous. No, America must have her special line and no one better than
Delancey knew how to mix the fragrance of true love with the flavour of
Wall Street and serve at the right temperature.

He wasn't proud of his writing--or, rather, he wasn't proud of it with
every one. In his heart of hearts, what he wanted was not the applause
of the public, but the faith of a coterie, to be a martyr, misunderstood
by the many, worshipped by the few. A Bloomsbury hero, a Chelsea King!
"We confess that as a writer Mr. Delancey Woburn is altogether too
rarefied for our taste. His work is far too impregnated by the stamp of
a tiny clique of rather self-conscious superintellectuals. Reading his
books, we feel as if we had suddenly entered a room full of people who
know one another very well. In other words, we feel out of it."

What would not Delancey have given for a review that began like that!
Instead of which the best that he could hope for in "shorter notices"
would be an announcement that "Mr. Woburn's many admirers will no doubt
find his last book eminently to their taste. He provides a lavish supply
of the features they are accustomed to look for in his work."

Poor Delancey, his stories _did_ sell so well! And there was his flat in
Grafton Street with the beautiful new taffetas curtains and the cigars
that had just arrived from Havana, wit