On the following afternoon he managed to leave the plumbing shop, with a plea of illness, and raced to the office of the magazine. A feathery swirl of quickly purchased emotions--fragments of a youth that had been shattered--revolved within his heart. As he closed the door of the large office he saw two women seated at different desks and poised over the rustle of papers. One was elderly and sedate, and her sober clothes were reprimanding a substantial body. Beneath a survival of greyish-brown hair, plainly gathered, the narrow oval of her face looked at life with a politely questioning air. It was the mellowly distorted expression of one who has arrived at final convictions regarding the major parts of life, and is patiently and inflexibly regarding the lesser perceptions surrounding her. Her slightly wrinkled face was dominated by a long, thin nose and thin, tightly expectant lips, and it seemed that her tired emotions had gone to sleep and were staring out from a dream of suave wakefulness. The other woman was hovering near the last climax of her youth, and her slender body rose unobtrusively to the pale repressions of her face. Small and round, her face carried a well-trimmed self-satisfaction--the reward of one whose dreams have lived inwardly, with only an occasional sip of forbidden cordials. Her loosely parted lips guarded a receding chin and her barely curved nose ascended to large brown eyes and a high forehead. Carl walked to her desk and stood for a moment like a child in a cumbersome robe who is waiting for some inevitable rebuke. The harshly weary assurance which he was able to display to other people vanished in this imagined shrine of an unattained art. The young woman looked up with courteous blankness. “My name is Carl Felman. You wrote me a note last week,” said Carl, delicately groping for the inconsequential words. “Oh, yes, I remember”--her face attained a careful smile, tempered by a modest curiosity. “I’m so glad that you came down.” She turned to the other woman. “Mary, this is Mr. Felman, the gentleman that I spoke to you about. He sent us a rather interesting group of poems, you know.” Carl winced at the word “rather”--it was associated to him with “more or less,” “somewhat,” “somehow,” and “to some extent,” those words and phrases with which cultured people manage to say nothing and yet preserve the faint appearance of saying something. His breathless attention disappeared and was replaced by the old morose aloofness. If this woman had asserted that his poems were trivial or stifled, he would have respected her, but now he spat contemptuously at the smooth veil of her words. Mary Aldridge, editor of The Poetry Review, moved her lips into an attitude that came within a hair’s breadth of being a smile--an expression of slightly amused and restrained condescension. She lifted a pencil as though it were an age-old scepter held by practiced fingers. “How do you do, Mr. Felman,” she said.