The Things We Are: A Novel

Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV BETTINGTON "Alas! I shall never be a Tolstoyan. In women I love beauty above all things, and in the history of mankind culture expressed in carpets, spring carriages and keenness of wit. Ach! To make haste and become an old man and sit at a big table!"--Anton Tchehov. WHEN Bettington received Mr. Boston's telegram he was writing his weekly page of literary gossip for Woman and Child. Literary gossip for women and children did not come easy to him. Nothing did, but this was by far the hardest of all; for he had a peculiar conscience. His editor, pleased with the unfailing regularity and neatness of his manuscript, was yet in two minds about him. He told him that his page lacked "warmth." And Bettington knew it. He also was in two minds. The one said sternly, menacingly, that he must give it up; the other whispered that to hold on was the only way out. For Bettington was a man of dreams. He dreamed of independence, of a remote cottage in the country, of an ideal love, of patient, undisturbed, selfsatisfying work at--something or other. It didn't matter what you did, he thought, if your heart was in it and it was not shoddy; and it seemed to him that in the cottage of his desire, with the independence he craved, he could put his heart into anything. He brought his ideal to earth; he fixed his goal at a thousand pounds. That was something solid behind which he could hide all the problems of the future. With the thousand pounds--seventy pounds a year if he invested it circumspectly--he could breathe and think. Even now, in these times, he could live on a pound a week at a pinch. For the last two summers he had made the experiment, most scrupulously. Four years of the war, too, miraculously without a scratch, had brought him down to...