Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/335

 Only by trial and error, he reflected, can one find out what one truly thinks: you match your characters and situations and theories much as Mme. Choiseul matches bits of velvet and silk, and it's only when you've erected them into a monstrous burlesque that you see what you should have done to make it stylish. Even Goethe, he was thinking, would have spared Werther's life in a revised version.

The story would have to be rewritten, but at least he now had a clue to it.

Mme. Choiseul and her hats and blotches and daily misadventures with the milk had been getting on his nerves. More than once he had contemplated moving into a small flat. One reason I have no friends, the thought one day struck him, is that I have no home. He had run into Mamie Mangum and she had asked him to tea, and it occurred to him that it would be pleasant to have an apartment,—not like Mamie's, heaven forbid!—and to invite people for tea—or whatever, he added guiltily to himself.

Mamie had shown him a notice in an American musical weekly which recounted in phrases almost dithyrambic her triumphs in Naples and Rome. Grover couldn't repress a suspicion that Mamie had paid for the notices with money her father had earned on the sale of sheep and steers, but the fact remained that she was proving her right to exist. She was now working like a Trojan for a debut in Brussels, and being before his eyes a fantastic illustration of the