"That is where the trouble comes in, as you would say—although you are a little better in that way than you used to be. You wanted to 'serve God and Mammon,' to be applauded in the literary reviews whilst working up sentimental situations with which to draw tears from shopgirls..."
"I am conscious of being unfairly treated by the so-called literary papers," I argued. "I write of human beings, men and women; loving, suffering, living. You wrote of abstractions, making phrases. The sentences of one of your characters could have been put in the mouths of any of the others. Life, it was of life I wrote. Now that I am dying..."
"You are not dying, only drugged. And you are jealous again all the time. Jealous of Gabriel Stanton, who despised your work and could not recall your personality, however often he met you. Jealous of the literary critics who ignored you and praised me. And jealous of Peter, Peter Kennedy, who from the first would have laid down his great awkward body for me to tread upon."
I half woke up, raised myself on my arm, and drank a little water, looked over to where Margaret sat, but she was no longer there. I did not want to go to sleep again, and lay on my back thinking of what had been told me. "Jealous!" Why should I be jealous of Margaret Capel's dead fame, of her dying memory? But perhaps it was true. I had a
