everybody was discussing whether or not it was really poetry. The local
papers had taken it up, and daily there appeared columns of learned criticisms,
facetious editorials, and serious letters from subscribers. Helen Della Delmar
(proclaimed with a flourish of trumpets and rolling of tomtoms to be the
greatest woman poet in the United States) denied Brissenden a seat beside her on
Pegasus and wrote voluminous letters to the public, proving that he was no poet.
    The Parthenon came out in its next number patting itself on the back for the
stir it had made, sneering at Sir John Value, and exploiting Brissenden's death
with ruthless commercialism. A newspaper with a sworn circulation of half a
million published an original and spontaneous poem by Helen Della Delmar, in
which she gibed and sneered at Brissenden. Also, she was guilty of a second
poem, in which she parodied him.
    Martin had many times to be glad that Brissenden was dead. He had hated the
crowd so, and here all that was finest and most sacred of him had been thrown to
the crowd. Daily the vivisection of Beauty went on. Every nincompoop in the land
rushed into free print, floating their wizened little egos into the public eye
on the surge of Brissenden's greatness. Quoth one paper: »We have received a
letter from a gentleman who wrote a poem just like it, only better, some time
ago.« Another paper, in deadly seriousness, reproving Helen Della Delmar for her
parody, said: »But unquestionably Miss Delmar wrote it in a moment of badinage
and not quite with the respect that one great poet should show to another and
perhaps to the greatest. However, whether Miss Delmar be jealous or not of the
man who invented Ephemera, it is certain that she, like thousands of others, is
fascinated by his work, and that the day may come when she will try to write
lines like his.«
    Ministers began to preach sermons against »Ephemera,« and one, who too
stoutly stood for much of its content, was expelled for heresy. The great poem
contributed to the gayety of the world. The comic verse-writers and the
cartoonists took hold of it with screaming laughter, and in the personal columns
of society weeklies jokes were perpetrated on it to the effect that Charley
Frensham told Archie Jennings, in confidence, that five lines of »Ephemera«
would drive a man to beat a cripple, and that ten lines would send him to the
bottom of the river.
    Martin did not laugh; nor did he grit his teeth in anger. The effect
produced upon him was one