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 Fairchild opened a fresh bottle. “Somebody’ll have to dig up some more glasses. Mark, see if you can slip back to the kitchen and get one or two more. Let’s see the book,” he said reaching his hand. The Semitic man forestalled him.

“You go ahead and give us some whisky. I’d rather forget my grief that way, just now.”

“But look,” Fairchild insisted. The other fended him off.

“Give us some whisky, I tell you,” he repeated. “Here’s Mark with the glasses. What we need in this country is protection from artists. They even want to annoy us with each other’s stuff.”

“Go ahead,” Fairchild replied equably, “have your joke. You know my opinion of smartness. ” He passed glasses among them.

“He can’t mean that,” the Semitic man said, “Just because the New Republic gives him hell—”

“But the Dial once bought a story of him,” Mark Frost said with hollow envy.

“And what a fate for a man in all the lusty pride of his Ohio valley masculinity: immolation in a home for old young ladies of either sex That atmosphere was too rare for him. Eh, Dawson?”

Fairchild laughed. “Well, I ain’t much of an Alpinist. What do you want to be in there for, Mark?”

“It would suit Mark exactly,” the Semitic man said, “that vague polite fury of the intellect in which they function. What I can’t see is how Mark has managed to stay out of it But then, if you’ll look close enough, you'll find an occasional grain of truth in these remarks which Mark and I make and which you consider merely smart. But you utter things not quite clever enough to be untrue, and while we are marveling at your profundity, you lose courage and flatly contradict yourself the next moment. Why, only that tactless