Page:The Voice of the City (1908).djvu/142



AVENEL—Ravenel, the traveller, artist and poet, threw his magazine to the floor. Sammy Brown, broker’s clerk, who sat by the window, jumped.

“What is it, Ravvy?” he asked. “The critics been hammering your stock down?”

“Romance is dead,” said Ravenel, lightly. When Ravenel spoke lightly he was generally serious. He picked up the magazine and fluttered its leaves.

“Even a Philistine, like you, Sammy,” said Ravenel, seriously (a tone that insured him to be speaking lightly), ‘‘ought to understand. Now, here is a magazine that once printed Poe and Lowell and Whitman and Bret Harte and Du Maurier and Lanier and—well, that gives you the idea. The current number has this literary feast to set before you: an article on the stokers and coal bunkers of battle-ships, an exposé of the methods employed in making liverwurst, a continued story of a Standard Preferred International Baking Powder deal in Wall Street, a ‘poem’ on the bear that the President missed, another ‘story’ by a young woman who spent a week as a spy making overalls on the East Side, another ‘fiction’ story that reeks of the ‘garage’ and a cer-