ied to indicate that he was having the
time of his life, at last. But there was something false--I cannot quite
express it--about his messages. They didn't ring true at all. He knew
it, and he knew that I knew it.

III

When he came back, after a year or so, there was a vast change in him.
He was more sure of himself; and in the Martin one night he told me how
various other periodicals were now after him. His rate would have to go
up, and all that sort of thing. He liked me, and _The Athenian_, but one
must grow, and there were wider fields for him to penetrate; and it was
all right that we had made him what he was, but in the final summing up
a man must think of himself, and one's career was one's career, you
know. He brought in several fashionable names, I remember--I don't
recall just how he did it, but he tried to appear casual when he spoke
of Mrs. Thus-and-So, who had a mansion on Fifth Avenue; and he indicated
that he often dined there now. They had met in the Orient, and Reggie
was a corker, too, and he might summer at Newport, and what did I think
of an offer of five thousand dollars from a great weekly for a serial
dealing with high life?

He sickened me that evening. Yes, he was a prig, a snob, and I don't
know what else. Frankly and coldly I told him to go to the dickens. Our
magazine had existed without him once upon a time, and it could go on
existing without him. I was sorry to see him make such a fool of
himself.

His whole attitude changed.

"Oh, don't think I mean all I say, Allison!" he pleaded. "I'll continue
to give you something now and again. After all, I've got a wide audience
with you people, and I don't quite wish to lose it."

That irritated me more than ever--his stupid patronage, his abominable
self-assurance. I remember paying the check very grandiloquently, and
leaving him alone--as he was so fond of being, at one time--in the
center of the room.

When we met thereafter of course we were exceedingly chilly to each
other. Once I saw him with Mrs. Thus-and-So, and he cut me dead. I
suppose I looked painfully inadequate, utterly unimportant to him that
afternoon. He had moved to higher circles; and after all I was only a
struggling young editor, who dressed rather badly--; all right for
certain occasions, but hardly one to be seen bowing to at a moment like
this! I read his mind, you see; and again he knew that I knew; and of
course he hated me from that time forth.

It was at th