There was nothing to do but write him a note and wait. She was not equal
to the humiliation of telephoning a third time. She wrote it at the hotel
where her English friends were staying and sent it by messenger, having
heard of the idiosyncracies of the Paris post.
Hastings, her newspaper friend, had been altogether a bird of ill omen. He
had told her that the American market was glutted with "war stuff." The
public was sick of it. Some of the magazines were advertising that
they would read no more of it. She had told him that her material was
magnificent and he had replied: "Can it. Maybe a year or two from
now--five, more likely. I'm told over here that the war fiction we've had
wished on us by the ton resembles the real thing just about as much as
maneuvers look like the first Battle of the Marne, say, when the Germans
didn't know where they were at; went out quail hunting and struck a jungle
full of tigers....Why not? When most of 'em were written by men of middle
age snug beside a library fire with mattresses on the roof--in America not
even a Zeppelin to warm up their blood. But that doesn't matter. The public
took it all as gospel. Ate it up. Now it is fed up and wants something
else."
What irony!
And what a future if he--but that she would not face.
CHAPTER XII
I
She heard Janet Maynard, who had returned alone the day before from
Nice, enter the next, room.
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