"But poets are my penchant!" a florid woman with a mannish but kindly face, that blossomed incongruously out of a gown of turquoise-blue, was declaring to John Hartley, who as a young man fresh from Oxford had been brought over to the corner wherein she held sway. It had startled her a little, obviously, to learn that this wide-shouldered young giant was a disciple of what she knew to be an exigent master, the ink-pot. "But not in the wild state," parried the young man, who still wore his metrical spurs somewhat awkwardly. That night he had felt for the first time that poetry was a thing to be lived down. "That's just it!" lamented the lady in turquoise-blue. "We can't get at you wild--you're all as unsatisfying as--as the caribou up in the Park. You either get blue-penciled out of existence or pink-teaed and petted out of decency!" The group of men clustered about Miss Short laughed encouragingly, for she was both well known and well liked, a personage most outspoken of opinion and most prodigal of epigram, relishing not a little her undisputed reputation for bluntness, lamenting even more her lapses into a quixotic soft-heartedness which left her the easy prey of those fellow-workers in a profession where mendicancy is not unheard of. Yet among those who knew her best her flashing wit seemed to save her to the last, for it was, to her, a sort of spade-bayonet with which she in some way entrenched herself when not piercing her enemy. "You're like our California plums," she went on genially; "you have all the bloom rubbed off before we can get hold of you." "But that's the trouble with genius in our age," interrupted Henry Slater, who declared himself to be a publisher and therefore to know whereof he spoke; "it has to be picked green, like watermelons, so as not to spoil on the market." "Still, I don't believe you're spoiled yet, Mr. Hartley. That's why I believe I'm going to like you," Miss Short added, with even more disconcerting candor. "And that's why I'm going to take you off and give you some good advice." There was a murmur of simulated jealousy. "The first of which should be a word or two about wearing the hair longer," said a tired-looking young man with a Turkish cigarette. "Right enough, Wheelock," said the publisher. "Heaven has given the snake his rattles, and the poet his hair. So that when we hear the one, Miss Short, and see the other, we all know what to do!" "And you might drop a hint about the Mills House often being the avenue to the Hall of Fame." It was Clive Hodge, the dramatist, speaking in his startlingly thin and girlish voice. "And why not a word about sneaking back to London and landing on us again in velvet and ruffles and a pre-Raphaelite get-up--with a hint to the reporters beforehand?" "And a warning, a sorrowful warning, Miss Short, to cultivate the camel-like capacity for hoofing the Desert of Dreams on, say, three square meals a week." Miss Short turned and looked at them scornfully.