Remembering this, Gilfoyle was uneasy. One ought to be careful to
keep an aseptic memory at home. Yet if this was not infidelity, what
would be? In a rich man Gilfoyle would have called it a typical
result of the evil influence of wealth. In the absence of wealth it
was a gay little Pierrot-perfidy of the _vie de Boheme_. Still,
poets have to be like that. An actor must make love to whatever
leading lady confronts him, and so must poets, the lawyers and press
agents of love.
But when he got home Gilfoyle repented as he remembered. He suffered
on a rack of guilty bliss, but he managed to hold back the secret
which was bubbling up in him with a bromo-seltzer effervescence.
Incidentally his "pretty maid, pretty maid, Marguerite" had kept
back the fact that she had a husband in the hardware business in
Terre Haute. What the husband was keeping back is none of this
history's business.
It was all as old and unoriginal as original sin. The important thing
to Kedzie was the fact that shortly after the poem had been revamped
a stranger had joined, first in song with Gilfoyle's table-load and
then in conversation. He had ended by introducing his companion and
bringing her over. Had it not been for the fine democracy of Bohemia
they would have cut the creature dead. She was a buyer, one of Miss
Ferber's Emma McChesneys on a lark.
Gilfoyle did not tell Kedzie any of this. He told what followed as
he toiled at the fearfully complicated problem of his shoe-laces,
a problem rendered almost insuperable by the fact that he could not
hold his foot high very long and dared not hold his head low at all.
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