"Oh, Lord, Olivia, what has that got to do with it?" He was sitting in my most commodious chair with his long knees crossed to prop up a manuscript from which he was reading me the notes of a tragedy he was about to undertake, and his quills were almost erect with the tweaking he had given them in the process of arriving at his climax. It was a curious fact that the breaking off of his marriage, which in the nature of the case could not be broken off sharp but had writhed and frayed him like the twisting of a green stick, by setting Jerry free for those light adventures of the affections which had been so largely responsible for the rupture of his domestic relations, instead of multiplying his propensity by his opportunity, had landed him on a plane of self-realization in which they were no longer needful. The poet in Jerry would never be able to resist the attraction of youth and freshness, but the man in him was forever and unassailably beyond their reach. I was never more convinced of this than when he turned on this occasion from the preoccupation of his creative mood, to offer whatever his point of attachment life had provided him, to bridge across the chasm of my spirit. "I don't see why it is important that we should know what we are working for; we might, in our confounded egotism, not approve of it, we might even think we could improve on the pattern. I write plays and you act them and a bee makes honey. I suppose there's a beekeeper about, but that's none of our business." "Ah, if we could only be sure of that--if He would only make himself manifest; that's what I'm looking for, just a hint of what He's trying to do with us." "Well, I can tell you: He'll smoke you out of New York and into a sanitarium, if you don't know enough to take a change and a rest." "Poly wants me to go on the road for a while; sort of triumphal progress. He thinks applause will cure me." "You're getting that now. What would bring you around would be a good frost." "You wouldn't want that in Chicago?" Jerry disentangled his limbs and sat up sniffing the wind of success. "If I could have you to open with my play in Chicago," he averred solemnly, "I'd be ready to sing the Lord Dismiss Us." He really thought so. To go back to the scene of his early struggle with his laurels fresh on him, to satisfy the predictions of his earliest friends and confound his detractors, above all to be received in his own country with that honour which is denied to prophets, seemed to him then almost as desirable in prospect as it proved in fact not to be. I found another advantage in the confusion and excitement of touring, in being able to conceal from myself that I hadn't had a satisfactory letter from Helmeth since the pair of telegrams that passed between us, and no letter at all for a long time. It was always possible to pretend to myself that the letters had been written but were delayed in forwarding.