Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/120

"Never," I said. "Coal, I presume, made you think of diamonds; and diamonds, of Miss Larsen. Were you engaged to her?"

"I might have been," he said, sentimentally.

Before us was an empty bench, on a little knoll that looks out over the shining sweep of the river. I drew him to it, and we filled our pipes. When you can get a minor poet in an autobioloquacious mood, it is well to encourage him. No one takes life so seriously as the minor poet, and consequently his memoirs make fine sport for the disinterested bystander.

"No," he said, blowing a waft of tobacco smoke into the soft, sun-brimmed air, and settling down into the curve of the bench. "The association was even more obvious than that of coal and diamonds. I always think of Gloria when winter begins to come in."

"Ah!" I said. "She was cold?"

He meditated, ignoring my jocularity.

"It was a good many years ago," he said at last; "before you knew me. When I first came to town, you know, I had a fine ambition to be a writer. I had just a little money, so I shut myself up in a hall room at the top of a cheap lodging-house on Seventy-fifth Street, hired a typewriter, and set