Page:Hermione and her little group of serious thinkers (1923, c1916).djvu/54

 Hermione immortally, an authentic star. Well, well, we all have our little plans, our little vanities!

&quot;Fothergil,&quot; I said, cheerily, &quot;Popularity has not overtaken you yet. Cheer up—perhaps it never will.&quot;

We were in Fothergil s studio in Greenwich Village, where I had gone to see how his poem on Moonlight was getting along. He strode to the window. Fothergil is not tall, and he is slightly pigeon-toed—the fleshly toes of Fothergil symbolize the toes of his ever-fleeing soul—but he strides. Female poets undulate. Erotic male poets saunter. Tramp poets lurch and swagger. Fothergil, being a vers libre poet, a Prophet of the Virile, a Little Brother of the Cosmic Urge, is compelled by what his verse is to stride vigorously across rooms as if they were vast desert places, in spite of what his toes are. He strode magnificently, triumphantly, to the window and flung the shade up, and looked out at the amorphous mist creeping in across the roofs. The crawling fog must have suggested his great, gray Dread, for presently he turned away with a shudder and sank upon a couch and moaned.

'Ah, Heaven! Popularity! The disgrace of it—the horror of it! Popularity! Ignominy! When It catches me—when it happens——"

He plucked from his pocket a small phial and held [40]