“I’m not so sure of it, since yesterday. I couldn’t take their chances. I couldn’t sit down and do a novel and not know how I was going to eat my way through. I couldn’t scrub tenement-house floors for the privilege of writing a book.... Oh, I love books all right. I rise up and yell when a big short story comes in the office, or breaks out anywhere. I think I know a real one, but a man’s got to do a whole lot of appreciating before he gets to doing. I’m not bred somehow as those people are. I’m the first of the Cobdens to break out of trade. They call _me_ a dreamer, my people do--yet compared to those boys and girls in Harrow Street, I’m a basket of fish with only a wiggle at the bottom----” “Get out,” said John Higgins. “The first thing you know, you’ll be going down there again.” “I will,” said Dicky. “I’m going down there to live.” “Eh?” The younger man nodded seriously. “They’re crazy, perhaps, but I’m convinced from yesterday of one thing: One can’t be sane as I am, and ever find the Big Story, much less write it.” “Therefore the first thing to do is to go insane.” “It isn’t like that,” Dicky said gently. “I’ve been brought up to think I know New York, belong and breathe in New York. You see, my family has lived here a hundred years. But yesterday I saw New York for the first time. She isn’t an old Dutch frump, as we thought, John. She’s a damsel! She’s a new moon----” “Blue eyes?” said John Higgins. “No, that’s the little girl from Los Angeles. It’s the landlady, of course, who’s the spirit of the place. I figured out afterward that it was because she was there that I liked everybody and had a good time. Wouldn’t be surprised to hear she was a priestess of some sort. I asked if she were Hindu, and she said ‘Yes,’ but she talks as if she were out of an English convent. Of course, most of her lodgers don’t get her. One old actor, out of a job, leaned across the table to me yesterday when Miss Claes left the room. He tapped his forehead, whispering, ‘Lovely, eh, but got the Ophelias.’” “Is she young?” John Higgins asked presently. “Moreover,” Dicky added, lost in thought, “I believe Miss Claes knows that they think her cracked and doesn’t mind.... Young? Say, I don’t know, John. You don’t think of her with years, somehow--rather as one who has reached the top of herself and decided to stay there.” John Higgins leaned back, drained his coffee cup and stared with eyes that smarted at the steaming ceiling. “Is Naidu going to do us another story?” “We didn’t get to that, but they gave me a novel manuscript to read.” “His?” “No, I didn’t get it straight whose it was. Miss Claes handed it over, suggesting I look at it for a serial. Some one in the house had written it or left it there.” “We’d better be going back to the office. Have you read into the novel?” “Started, but didn’t get really going. It’s back-age France stuff, and I was a little lost last night on the subject of 54 Harrow Street.”