He wrote a cynical story which featured his father's funeral and
despatched it to a magazine, receiving in return a check for sixty
dollars and a request for more of the same tone. This tickled his vanity,
but inspired him to no further effort.
He read enormously. He was puzzled and depressed by "A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man"; intensely interested by "Joan and Peter" and "The
Undying Fire," and rather surprised by his discovery through a critic
named Mencken of several excellent American novels: "Vandover and the
Brute," "The Damnation of Theron Ware," and "Jennie Gerhardt." Mackenzie,
Chesterton, Galsworthy, Bennett, had sunk in his appreciation from
sagacious, life-saturated geniuses to merely diverting contemporaries.
Shaw's aloof clarity and brilliant consistency and the gloriously
intoxicated efforts of H. G. Wells to fit the key of romantic symmetry
into the elusive lock of truth, alone won his rapt attention.
He wanted to see Monsignor Darcy, to whom he had written when he landed,
but he had not heard from him; besides he knew that a visit to Monsignor
would entail the story of Rosalind, and the thought of repeating it
turned him cold with horror.
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