While Anthony was thinking this, Dick had got to his feet and seemed to be hesitating at an avowal.
"I've gathered quite a few books," he said suddenly.
"So I see."
"I've made an exhaustive collection of good American stuff, old and new. I don't mean the usual Longfellow-Whittier thing--in fact, most of it's modern."
He stepped to one of the walls and, seeing that it was expected of him, Anthony arose and followed.
"Look!"
Under a printed tag Americana he displayed six long rows of books, beautifully bound and, obviously, carefully chosen.
"And here are the contemporary novelists."
Then Anthony saw the joker. Wedged in between Mark Twain and Dreiser were eight strange and inappropriate volumes, the works of Richard Caramel--"The Demon Lover," true enough ... but also seven others that were execrably awful, without sincerity or grace.
Unwillingly Anthony glanced at Dick's face and caught a slight uncertainty there.
"I've put my own books in, of course," said Richard Caramel hastily, "though one or two of them are uneven--I'm afraid I wrote a little too fast when I had that magazine contract. But I don't believe in false modesty. Of course some of the critics haven't paid so much attention to me since I've been established--but, after all, it's not the critics that count. They're just sheep."
For the first time in so long that he could scarcely remember, Anthony felt a touch of the old pleasant contempt for his friend. Richard Caramel continued: "My publishers, you know, have been advertising me as the Thackeray of America--because of my New York novel."
"Yes," Anthony managed to muster, "I suppose there's a good deal in what you say."
He knew that his contempt was unreasonable. He, knew that he would have changed places with Dick unhesitatingly. He himself had tried his best to write with his tongue in his cheek. Ah, well, then--can a man disparage his life-work so readily? ...
--And that night while Richard Caramel was hard at toil, with great hittings of the wrong keys and screwings up of his weary, unmatched eyes, laboring over his trash far into those cheerless hours when the fire dies down, and the head is swimming from the effect of prolonged concentration--Anthony, abominably drunk, was sprawled across the back seat of a taxi on his way to the flat on Claremont Avenue.
THE BEATING
As winter approached it seemed that a sort of madness seized upon Anthony. He awoke in the morning so nervous that Gloria could feel him trembling in the bed before he could muster enough vitality to stumble into the pantry for a drink. He was intolerable now except under the influence of liquor, and as he seemed to decay and coarsen under her eyes, Gloria's soul and body shrank away from him; when he stayed out all night, as he did several times, she not only failed to be sorry but even felt a measure of relief. Next day he would be faintly repentant, and would remark in a gruff, hang-dog fashion that he guessed he was drinking a little too much.