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 “They bear geniuses. But do you think they care anything about the pictures and music their children produce? That they have any other emotion than a fierce tolerance of the vagaries of the child? Do you think Shakespeare’s mother was any prouder of him than, say, Tom o’ Bedlam’s?”

“Certainly she was,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Shakespeare made money.”

“You made a bad choice for comparison,” Fairchild said.

“All artists are kind of insane. Don’t you think so?” he asked Mrs. Wiseman.

“Yes,” she snapped. “Almost as insane as the ones that sit around and talk about them.”

“Well—” Fairchild stared again at the page under his hand. He said slowly: “It’s a kind of dark thing. It’s kind of like somebody brings you to a dark door. Will you enter that room, or not?”

“But the old fellows got you into the room first,” the Semitic man said. “Then they asked you if you wanted to go out or not.”

“I don’t know. There are rooms, dark rooms, that they didn’t know anything about at all. Freud and these other—”

“Discovered them just in time to supply our shelterless literati with free sleeping quarters. But you and Eva just agreed that subject, substance, doesn’t signify in verse, that the best poetry is just words.”

“Yes infatuation with words,” Fairchild agreed. “That’s when you hammer out good poetry, great poetry. A kind of singing rhythm in the world that you get into without knowing it, like a swimmer gets into a current. WordsI had it once.”

“Shut up, Dawson,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Julius can afford to be a fool.”

“Words,” repeated Fairchild. “But it’s gone out of me,