...
* * * * *
So, as I rode in the dusty, bumping train, my mind reverted to our whole
friendship together, and tenderness welled up in my heart for Penton
Baxter.
* * * * *
In the office of the New York _Independent_ sat William Hayes Ward, old,
bent over, with his triple-lensed glasses behind which his dim, enlarged
eyes floated spectrally like those of a lemur.
He greeted me with a mixture of constraint and friendliness.
"Well, my boy, you've certainly got yourself into a mess this time."
"A 'mess,' Dr. Ward?" I interrogated, quoting back to him the word he
had used,--with rebuke in my voice.
"How else shall I phrase it?"
"--with the understanding that I expect from an old friend, one who
bought my first poems, encouraged my first literary endeavours,--who
enheartened and helped me at the inception of my struggle for
recognition and fame."
"And now you've won too much of the baser coinage of fame, of a kind
that a poet should never have."
"I have a poem with me ... one on the subject of what Christ wrote on
the sand--after which he bade the woman go and sin no more ... and he
who was without sin should cast the first stone."
Dr. Ward looked over the half-moons of his triple glasses at me ... he
reached for the poem and read it.
"Yes, it's a fine poem, with that uniqueness in occasional lines, that
occasional touch of power, that marks your worst effusions, Mr.
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