There’s nothing wrong with you—do you hear?”… whack! “You’re frightened half out of your wits,”… whack!… “just because you’ve tried to stuff everything down your throat at once!” whack! whack!
And by this time Miss Potter would be on the road to recovery, gasping and panting more easily now, as she continued to look up with a fixed stare of her bulging eyes at Miss Flitcroft, with an expression full of entreaty, dawning hopefulness, apology, and pitiable gratitude.
As for Ten Eyck, his pain and embarrassment when one of these catastrophes occurred were pitiable. He would scramble to his feet, stand helplessly, half-crouched, casting stricken glances toward the most convenient exit as if contemplating the possibility of a sudden and inglorious flight. Then he would turn again toward the two old women, his dark eyes fixed on them in a fascinated stare in which anguish, sympathy, helplessness and horror were all legible.
For several years, in spite of her ill health, Miss Potter had fiddled around on the edges of Professor Hatcher’s celebrated course at the university. She had written a play or two herself, took a passionate interest in what she called “the work,” was present at the performances of all the plays, and was a charter member of Professor Hatcher’s carefully selected and invited audiences. Now, whether by appointment or self-election, she had come to regard herself as a kind of ambassadress for Professor Hatcher’s work and was the chief sponsor of its social life.
The grotesque good old woman was obsessed by that delusion which haunts so many wealthy people who have no talent and no understanding, but who are enchanted by the glamour which they think surrounds the world of art. Miss Potter thought that through these Friday afternoons she could draw together all the talent, charm, and brilliance of the whole community. She thought that she could gather here not only Professor Hatcher’s budding dramatists and some older representatives of the established order, but also poets, painters, composers, philosophers, “radical thinkers,” people “who did interesting things,” of whatever kind and quality. And she was sure that from his mad mélange everyone would derive a profitable and “stimulating” intercourse.
Here, from the great “art community” of Cambridge and Boston, came a whole tribe of the feeble, the sterile, the venomous and inept—the meagre little spirits of no talent and of great pretensions: the people who had once got an essay printed in The Atlantic Monthly or published “a slender
