The Eleventh Virgin by Dorothy Day (important books to read .TXT) 📕

artist who had the conviction that Hugh would become famous⁠—as a matter of fact most of his friends had that conviction⁠—had painted a life-size portrait of him several years before and in it brought out his extremely dusky transparency. There was almost a greenish light on his face. You did not notice the color of his hair or eyes. They were contradictory eyes. They were curiously detached and yet luminously sympathetic.

During the course of the lunch June noticed that his clothes as well as his manners had the same awkwardness. It came, she thought, from extreme shyness, and remained with him even when he forgot himself in the heat of discussion. Behind his writing desk, he had poise. With a pen in his hand he was gracious as well as graceful. He lost neither his dignity nor his train of thought when interrupted even when he had fulfilled the expectations of his friends and did become famous, giving up his magazine work to spend eight hours a day or an entire night, as the case may be, at his desk. For back of his apparent softness there was a streak of iron and he was never ill.

“Tomorrow the magazine goes to press,” he told them, “and I am short two book reviews. Have you got your ‘copy’ with you, Terry?”

Terry produced his “copy.” As dramatic critic, he didn’t feel called upon to confine his attention to the current plays on Broadway. He had found himself down on the Bowery near the Italian burlesque show not many weeks before and the result was a criticism and comparison of that production with the latest success of Broadway. Terry did not generally call himself a dramatic critic. He preferred to think of himself as a critic of life and there was much philosophy of a sort in his articles. His style reminded June of Robert Ingersoll. While the latter directed his criticism at the theology of the day, Terry hurled defiance and ridicule at the conventions of the world. All his energy he seemed to put in his writing.

After Terry’s contribution had been read and discussed Hugh reverted to his own troubles. “I’ve got one review planned out pretty well,” he said. “There are really only three ways of writing reviews. Usually you have to struggle to make the book fit into one of the three reviews⁠—that is, if it is worth reviewing. As a matter of fact this one falls in perfectly with one of them and it’s as good as written now. It’s the story of a man’s spiritual development, and you can take the personal view. You test its worth by applying your personal experience. The man in the story finally comes to believe in a God⁠—strange, but it’s a book that’s making a big sale with young soldiers on their way to the front.

“We all have a God of one kind or another. At one time, my God was a socialist ideal. Just now I find myself a Tolstoyan without accepting his idea of a personal Deity. But it’s wartime and our only ideal can be internationalism.

“But, damn it! That doesn’t solve the question of where I’m going to get another review to fill those extra two pages. I don’t feel as though I’m going to write more than that one I’m interested in.”

“I’ve just been reading a book that I’d like to review,” June put in.

Hugh looked at her hopefully.

“It’s an old copy of Aurora Leigh that I picked up in a secondhand store over on Third Avenue, printed in eighteen seventy-seven or thereabouts. I’ve read Aurora Leigh before and it’s been reviewed before. But this is an exceptional copy. There’s nothing like it in the world. Better than any first edition. It’s a present some young woman made to a friend of hers fifty years ago, but before she made the gift she went through it calling attention to different parts of it in marginal notes. And it seems from the notes that both of them were ardent suffragettes and indignant at the part they had to play in life as stay-at-homes.”

“That sounds as though it would be amusing,” Hugh said enthusiastically. “We could call it ‘Review of the marginal notes in an old edition of Aurora Leigh.’ You couldn’t have it done by tomorrow, could you?”

“Sure,” June agreed willingly. “I’m so interested in the book that it would be easy to write a review of it. I thought of it in fact, but was too lazy to do it. Now that there is some reason for it and somebody wants it, I’ll get right to work.”

A week after that Hugh Brace telephoned June at her office inviting her to lunch with him the next day. When she met him in a little restaurant near the Flame office, he showed her the proof of her review and it looked far more dignified to her than any of the signed “stories” that she had seen under her name in the Clarion. Only her initials were signed to it.

“And now,” said Hugh, “how would you like to have a steady editorial position on the Flame? Do you know anything about makeup or type or proof reading? No. Well those things don’t matter because I can teach them to you very easily. What really matters is whether you have good taste and from the tone of your review, I think you have. You can’t tell anything from your newspaper work, you know. Journalism is beyond taste, it seems to me.”

That was how June felt about it.

“What we want is literary taste and I guess you have it. Alaric is going to spend most of the summer lecturing in the west on poetry⁠—woman’s clubs, you know, and I’ve kicked about the burden of work falling on me. So he’s agreed to pay ten dollars a week to someone who will assist me.”

“And what’ll I have to do?” asked June breathless.

“Well, the simplest thing is to