Vance, with a feverish hand, pulled out a bundle of papers—the poems he had written at Paul's Landing, and some of the stuff which had poured from his pen in the long hungry hours at the rooming house. He laid them on the desk, and Frenside adjusted his eyeglasses. It seemed to Vance as if he were fitting his eyes to an exceptionally powerful microscope.

"H'm—poetry. All poetry?"

"Most of what I've written is."

"Well, poetry won't earn your keep: it's pure luxury. Like keeping a car."

Silence followed. At intervals it was broken by what sounded to Vance like the roar of the sea, but was in reality the scarce audible rustle as Frenside unfolded one sheet after another. He was doubtless not accustomed to reading manuscript, and to Vance's agony of apprehension was added the mortification of not having been able to type his poems before submitting them. In most editorial offices, he knew, they wouldn't look at handwritten things; presenting the poems to Frenside in this shape would probably do away with their one chance. Vance thought of offering to read them aloud, remembered Miss Spear's comment on his enunciation, and dared not.

The roar of unfolding pages continued.

"H'm," said Frenside again. He spread the papers out before him, and puffed in silence.

"Well, you're at the sedulous age," he continued after a pause. (What did that mean?) "Can't be helped, of course. Here's the inevitable Shakespeare sonnet: 'What am I but the shape your love has made me?'—and the Whitman: 'Vast enigmatic reaches of ocean beyond me'—just so. It is beyond you, my dear fellow, at least at present. Ever seen the ocean?"

Vance could hardly find his voice. He shook his head.

"Not even at Coney Island?" Frenside shrugged. "Not that that matters. Look here; this is all Poets' Corner stuff. Try it on your hometown paper. That's my advice. There are pretty things here and there, of course; you like the feel of words, don't you? But poetry, my son, is not a halfway thing. I remember once asking a book-learned friend if he cared for poetry, and he answered cautiously: 'Yes, up to a certain point.' Well, the devil of it is that real poetry doesn't begin till beyond that certain point… . See?"

Vance signed that he saw: somehow he liked that definition of poetry, even at the cost of having to sacrifice his own to it.

"How about prose; never written any?"

The unexpectedness of the question jerked Vance out of the clouds. "I—I'm writing a novel."

"Hullo—are you? What about."

"About life in New York."

"I thought so," said Frenside grimly. There was another silence. "Never tried an article or a short story?"

"Never anything—good enough." Vance got wearily to his feet. "I guess I'll take these things and burn 'em," he said, putting out his hands for the poems.