web of life and error in full play and magnificently alive. As for the fancied woes and hardships of the young artist in conflict with the dull and brutal Philistines, —that, he saw later, had had nothing to do with it, and was not worth a damn, any more than the plays that had been written in Professor Hatcher’s class, and in which a theatrical formula for living was presented in place of life. No; the conflict, the comedy, the tragedy, —the pain, the pride, the folly and the error—might have been just the same had Eugene wanted to be an aviator, a deep-sea diver, a bridge-builder, a professional pall-bearer, or a locomotive engineer. And the study of life was there in all its overwhelming richness, was right there in his grasp, but he could not see it, and would not use it. Instead he went snooping and prowling around the sterile old brothels of the stage, mistaking the glib concoctions of a counterfeit emotion for the very flesh and figure of reality. And this also has been true of every youth that ever walked the earth.
The letter came at length one grey day in late October; and instantly, when he had opened it, and read the first words “We regret,” his life went grey as that grey day, and he thought that he would never have heart or hope nor know the living joy of work again. His flesh went dead and cold and sick, yet he read the smooth lying phrases in the letter with the stolid face with which people usually receive bad news, and even tried to insinuate a thread of hope, to suck a kind of meagre and hopeless comfort from the hard, yet oily, words, “We are looking forward with great interest to reading your next play, and we hope you will send it to us as soon as it is completed.”… “Our members were divided in their opinion, four voting to reconsider it and five for rejection… although all were agreed on the freshness and vitality of the writing… while the power of some of the scenes is undeniable… we must reluctantly…. You are one of the young men whose work we are watching with the greatest interest…” and so on.
Those on whom the naked weight of shame has rested, who have felt its grey and hideous substance in their entrails, will not smile calmly and with comfort if their memory serves them.
Now a huge, naked, and intolerable shame and horror pressed down on Eugene with a crushing and palpable weight out of the wet, grey skies of autumn. The hideous grey stuff filled him from brain to bowels, was everywhere and in everything about him so that he breathed it out of the air, felt it like a naked stare from walls and houses
