“What a curious, lunging person you are! But you shouldn’t have minded Miss Aldridge so much. She’s always afraid that if she openly encourages a young poet he’ll imagine that he’s a genius.” “That’s a harmless trick of imagination and it doesn’t need any encouragement or censure. It’s a shade better, perhaps, than imagining that you are a fool.” “What an old-young person you are. When you talk I feel that I’m listening to an insolent essay. I’m not so sure that a poet doesn’t need praise. It’s part of his task to change the polite praise around him to an understanding appreciation, and that can be very necessary and exciting.” “To a poet the appreciation of other people must be like a glass of lukewarm wine taken after work,” said Carl. “Well, I know that it means a great deal to me,” said Clara Messenger. “It reassures me that I’m speaking to the hearts and minds of the people around me and I’d feel very unimportant if at least a few people didn’t like my work. One can’t live in a vacuum, after all.” “No? I’ve done it for five years or so. I think that all of us secretly live in vacuums, but we use our imaginations to conceal that fact. Words were really invented to hide this essential emptiness.” “You’re a massive pessimist! The strangest man of twenty-three that I’ve ever seen! If things are so utterly hollow to you, why do you live?” “In order to persuade myself that I have a reason for living--a defiant entertainment in the presence of an empty theater.... But it’s always futile to defend your reason for living. Tell me, instead, what do you think of your associate, Miss Aldridge?” “I really think that she treated you a little heartlessly, but at the same time I don’t think that she meant to,” said Clara. “Mary is a woman who grew into the habit of hiding herself from people because so many of those who looked at her youth, at one time, failed to understand it.” “I can understand that process, though I don’t believe that it applies in her case. It’s a slow and sullen withdrawing from the jibing strangers around you--a wounded desire to meet their walls of misunderstanding with even harder walls of your own. As you grow older, I suppose, the sullenness may change to a well-mannered and hopeless aloofness. Age softens the attitude and, still self-immersed, it seeks the distraction of words.” “What has happened to make you say this?” asked Clara, with a mistily maternal impulse. “Just now I’m working in a plumber’s shop, helping the sewers with their sluggish germs of future turbulence,” said Carl, “and that, of course, can play its part in the making of a pessimist.... But tell me what you think of my work?” “Plumbing or poetry?” “Both of them are interwoven.”