No one could have resisted turning to observe the object of her favor. A tall man, in uniform, with broad shoulders, with the fouragère of the French Foreign Legion, was bowing to some party by the doorway, his back half turned

toward us.

He made the statement perfectly naturally.

"Just after that?" Maclay remarked, with as close to a hint of jest as he ever

comes.

"Yes, after that," Bissell answered, without a trace of humor. "I suppose

ruptly.

Stunned surprise enveloped me.
"Our Bissell?" I managed to inquire.
"Floyd," Maclay answered.

I drowned my nervous expectation in a dram of reasoned reassurance. Well, Maclay might have met him any day these last seven years. The only coincidence was the fact that he had just happened to be telling me about him.

The next moment Bissell saw us. Something caught in my throat. His eyes were like burned holes. Like iron was the set of his jaw, too; and he had a half-amused, tolerant smile that I could not for the life of me master.

He came over to us at once. "All the world comes to Madame Bourgnon's," he greeted us, and sat down. We fell into conversation-the publishing business, the Comédie Française, Sacha Guitry, Broadway. For a moment I was inclined to think Maclay had been telling me a fairy tale. And then I noticed suddenly that Bissell had not once referred to the past. He was confining himself to the talk of the moment while his eyes burned deep into us.

But it was not until we had ordered more liqueurs and got them that Maclay asked him about his book. It was an inevitable thing for Maclay to do, I suppose. He would have asked it of any author he had ever done business with. It was the one question he never failed to put. But it gave me a queer feeling.

"I suppose you mean the book I meant to have follow Tragic Conquest?" Bissell replied, while Maclay nodded. "I gave that up finally."

"Lose interest?"

"Not exactly," Bissell replied. "Not for the first three years."

didn't produce it-or anything more. I considered writing you the explanation -for some while, but I gave up the idea, finally. It didn't matter, I knew.”

Maclay put his hand on Bissell's arm abruptly.

"My dear boy, it mattered like hell," he said. "You owe your friends something."

"Yes," said Bissell, and stopped.

Well, we didn't urge him, of course. We couldn't. But there wasn't any necessity, as it happened. Decision seemed to come to him suddenly.

"There's no reason why I shouldn't tell you," he said.

He began in Clewesbury. He had been born there, on Congress Avenue, he said

which I gathered was the proper place to be born in that mid-Eastern city. What social position there was in the city his family had shared. As a boy he had had two gifts-writing and drawing. He had gone to Harvard in pursuit of one of them, and come out an architect. When he married he was already fairly well established. He had an office in one of the buildings downtown, and several country houses and the new Chamber of Commerce to his creditdue partly to his own ability, but more to the aid and prestige his position in Clewesbury society gave him.

His wife, Eveline, had come from St. Louis. She was a rather imperious, spoiled sort of woman, blessed with unusual charm, much given to outdoor things-riding, walking, golf, dogs. He had met her at Lake Placid during the winter sports. About a year after their marriage his boyhood desire to write had come back to him.

"I tried a play, and a short story or two," he said, staring at the marble

table between us, "but they weren't any good. They never got outside my library. It used to seem ironical to me once in a while that pleasant house of mine just off the Avenue, with the big, cool library-just the place in which to write a 'Candida' or a 'Youth.' And I without the ability to do it! Eveline didn't particularly sympathize, either. Plays were just things you went to, so far as she was concerned-she rather leaned to vaudeville. In fact, in Clewesbury everyone considers you fairly queer if you fool with literature or drama. If you write, you write on the quiet, unless you make so much money at it that you can be respectably compared to one of the factories. That makes you a success, of course. And success is all right. I remember the only remark George Broadhead made to me after he read Tragic Conquest. 'How much money did they give you for it?' says he! . .

"I suppose, though, that literature is a sort of passion in a man. There was a remnant of the idealistic philosophy of student days in me-die, and leave behind you a magnificent building, a fine book, a great play, a good example. Something to make it worth while to the world for having bred you. Maybe there was some conceit in me, too, some desire for fame probably there was. But I wasn't conscious of it. I just wanted to write, and write something damn good. Well, I tried plays for about three years -unsuccessfully.

"Then one day I came upon an old diary of a dead aunt of mine. I had been going over some of the old things in the Congress Avenue attic, looking for a tin box in which my father had been accustomed to put stocks of such ventures as went 'busted' on him, as he used to express it before he died. Mother was getting too old to fuss over things, and she had an idea there were some photographs that she wanted before the attic was cleaned out.

"The diary was one of those old, handclasp things. It covered about a year. I sat in the late afternoon light and read

Bissell clenched his fist.

"An Elaine in a miserable, narrow, small-minded western New York town of the early 'eighties.. Some day I'll let you take a look at that diary. And you'll know why I wrote Tragic Conquest. I can never begin to tell you the tragedy of it. Evidently there had been not a word of understanding, not a glimpse of human charity in her life, not a soul to see that passion and the tender heart had been to her what drink was to Poe, what ambition was to Alexander, what opium was to De Quincey-her curse. And every mean-spirited soul in that New York town was tarred a little with the same brush which had spoiled God's portrait of her.

"Even before I finished the last page I think I had the idea. I had heard all my life of my aunt Julia-heard this thing now, this thing then, been aware of odd discrepancies, suspected peccadilloes. But this thing lit the whole landscape with a flash of reality. This was the hell in which my aunt had lived and struggled. This was what she had thought and felt, and struggled against and lost and died for-generous, cursed, sin-stained Julia Bissell!

"Tragic Conquest was born in my mind as I came down the attic stairs, as I stood in front of my mother and realized I could never tell her what I had found, as I realized that she had been one of the hardest, most uncompromising of all the persons in her sister-in-law's life-as I realized the pettiness of us all, our pitiful lack of understanding, the wheel on which we break one another day after day. I knew, of course, that I could never reconstruct Julia Bissell's existence and put the breath of life into it. Her generation was too far removed

from mine. I could not publish the diary as it stood so long as I had any family. The diary was not understandable, either, without the background which youth and childhood in the Congress Avenue house had unconsciously given it for me. If anything was done with it, it would be better to pour the wine into some new vessel-into a Tragic Conquest. So that was what I decided to write. That, I decided, would be my great book, my example, my contribution. A little more charity in the world. A little more understanding, induced by the story of Elaine, if I could write it. Elaine, to-day, in Clewesbury, like Julia Bissell back in the 'eighties."

Bissell stared at us with that half smile I couldn't master.

"Naïve, I suppose considering I had never written anything, but very real to me. In fact, I began that night to write my novel. Day and night, perhaps I should say here, I wrote it, during every spare moment I could find. I took forgotten Julia Bissell and gave her a childhood in present-day Clewesbury-a childhood such as a sister of mine might have had if she had been born in one of the hard, materialistic homes just off Congress Avenue-one of those homes where cynicism and the dollar rule and convention masquerades as principle. By every device I could think of I contrived to produce the girl she must be to make my story teach its lesson. You remember-I took away her mother; I gave her no brothers or sisters; her father could not bear her because of the past; everything that would throw her only on herself, that would make her lonely, self-willed, passionate, afraid, suspicious, likely to be the victim of her inheritance. I did all that in preparation for her first indiscretion and her marriage that marriage which society practically forced on her because it told her there could be no love but the one love, and she must marry, even though she was never made for marriage and did not know love as the world understood it.

"There isn't any need for me to repeat it all here. I only say it so you will see how completely the climax of Elaine dominated the people of the story from the beginning. Like a prescription of some kind the thing was, calling for just these ingredients, just these characters, and nothing else to make an inevitable, crashing tragedy. All the details I would add would be simply for verisimilitude, to make the thing like life. A real human soul, living a real life. To make that life real and true to the present day, I ransacked every incident I had heard or experienced, selected the most likely ten from a thousand—the ten she could have experienced-reshaped and remade those ten, changing them to play their necessary part, and added them. By the time Elaine was married I could no more have told you where she came from than I could have told you whence came my opinions. She was a thousand people. She was Julia Bissell; she was anything but Julia Bissell. She was a new person. She was Elaine. . . . Elaine, with that same tragic nature that Julia Bissell must have had, and married now, and living in Clewesbury. I had her where I wanted her. I gave her a shallow, literary husband. I gave her an elemental desire for the masterful type of man. That was inevitable. I gave her a fearful struggle to strangle her desires, leading her to ride, to shoot, to play madly in an effort to exhaust herself so she would not have to face her own nature. She was no longer Julia Bissell at all. In my desire to get away from the strong impression which that forgotten figure had made on me I even made her fair, not dark; charming, not the moody person Julia had been. Then, to heighten the tragedy, I gave her the aspirations that all fine women have the aspirations that women such as Eveline have. She was always glimpsing that vision as she dragged herself through the mud of passion's gutter.

"Then I began her slow, tragic downfall, from passion to passion, from respectability to demimonde, to hell, to

"Yes," exclaimed Maclay, hoarsely, "by Godfrey! it is."

Iwould have done so had it not been for those plays, and her lack of analyzing ability. There is a magic about the printed page that doesn't lurk in manuscript. I wanted to surprise her, too— prove to her I could do something, after all, besides live on the Bissell money and draw plans for contractors to work upon.

"That's all, then," said Bissell, with sudden emotion. "I did it."

"All?" Maclay and I echoed our surprise together.

"Well, all of Elaine," he answered. "The rest-the rest, well, the rest is just merely Floyd Bissell-and I don't count, I suppose.'

Maclay and I sat in silence at that. He meant so patently that the rest had been tragedy for him. He meant, so plainly, that he had given the world his one book. He took it for granted so plainly that it had only been Elaine we were interested in.

"But your second book mattered, didn't it?" Maclay asked, unsteadily.

"I paid for my first with my second," Bissell said, gently. "Though perhaps not just as you suppose." He broke off, and did not resume for a moment. "I made my mistake, perhaps, in not showing Eveline the story first. I suppose I

VOL. CXLIV.-No. 859.-6

I could write a fine book. I could give back what life had given me in my two talents.

"When the book came out I gave five advance copies to my mother, Eveline, two of Eveline's best friends, and Fred Comyn, my best friend. Fred, of course, didn't read his. The book came out three weeks later. Two days afterward we went to Fred's to dinner. "I hear you've

got me in your book,' Fred said, jokingly, as he poured out some of his old brandy by the sideboard. I asked him what he meant by that, and he said: 'Why, that's what Amelia Bond told my wife this afternoon at the Babies' Sewing Circle. Sorry I haven't had a chance to read the yarn yet.'

"Well, you tell Amelia to guess again,' I laughed. 'How does she figure it?'

"She had figured him, Fred said, as the best friend of the husband in the story. And he made some joke about suing me for giving him such a minor role in a book, and we forgot the incident in some bridge.

course.

"But I didn't forget it completely, of Not that I attached any particular importance to it, but because I knew Amelia Bond. I suppose there is always such a woman in every society. Brilliant, but shallow, with a gift for

smart talk that passes for brains, ready always to sacrifice truth for an epigram or a laugh.

"Would she, I wondered, consider me the shallow literary husband in the story if Fred were my best friend? Eveline, too. Would Eveline play the role of Elaine? I rather grinned at thatgrinned, that is, until it occurred to me how far Amelia must have missed the point of the book to have made such a remark, even in jest. Had my purpose failed so utterly as that? Would it fail like that with the public at large?

"You can imagine the eagerness with which I awaited the reviews of the critics in the metropolitan papers and weeklies. I had subscribed to a clipping agency, of course, and in about a week the criticisms began to come in. They ran the gamut of the critic's soul, from first to last. They ranged from the three brief lines clipped from your publishing announcement-to full pages. In tone they varied from gentlemen who raged because I had split an infinitive on page twelve to gentlemen who wrote columns of drivel about the magic of my style and my insight. They varied from comparing the story to fiction of the Three Weeks genre to placing the story in the same category as Camille and Tess. But mixed in with them were the reviews that really counted-the fine, fair, critical appreciations that called it a sincere piece of work, marred by many minor faults, but good despite them, and criticized it as such. That minority, even though I was unknown, saw my point and drove it home to their public. To that minority I owe the success of Tragic Conquest.

"To Clewesbury, however, this was all completely unknown, of course, except to those few who followed the literary tide in other cities. Don't imagine, however, that the book didn't sell in Clewesbury. It did. It sold amazingly. Not even the derogatory reviews the two local papers gave it seemed to have any effect upon its selling qualities. Henry Drew told me he had sold five hundred in

the first ten days. I was enormously pleased. It occurred to me that possibly Clewesbury was wiser than its critics. What did the five hundred think of Elaine?

"That was about all I was speculating on, as a matter of fact, during the first two months after Tragic Conquest was published. I had no idea of any personal gossip. I did sit behind two strange women in the street car one morning and hear them discuss Tragic Conquest. They evidently considered it salacious. The 'warmest' thing she had ever read, one of them declared. That made me angry-to think that was all those two well-fed old harpies could see in it. It was in accord, in a way, with what a good many people said almost to my face, notably some of the men with whom I played pool of a later afternoon at the Clewesbury Club. Elaine was 'some baby,' according to them-and where had I met her, and how did I know all these things, anyhow? But what was only badinage with them was plain filthiness with these two.

"It gave me my second shock. I wondered how many people there were who would take Elaine's tragedy that way, and made a mental note of what a give-away of character such opinions were. But I knew that a certain amount of misinterpretation was inevitable because of the very fact that such a tragedy as Elaine's was possible. There would be people who would view the book as they had viewed Julia Bissell, no matter what new view of her soul I gave them. My mother felt that way, I was sure. She had sufficient perception to appreciate the art of the book, but she still believed that you didn't have to write about such things.' Next time she hoped I would choose a subject that didn't contain so much rubbish.

"I had hit upon the idea for that next book, however, by that time, and was completely wrapped up in it. A man who believed in people, and whose belief was so strong that in the end they became what he believed them to be that