COLTRANE still maintains that he acted rightly in the matter. I have long since ceased arguing with him, partly because it is useless and partly because, after reading her latest poems, I am beginning to agree that Laura Lent's happiness is worth less to the world than her work.

      I was with Coltrane the first time he received a manuscript from her. He opened it in his usual bored way, polished his glasses and read it through. But instead of reaching toward the pigeon-hole marked "Regret Slips," he went over again slowly and thoughtfully, with the expression of a man who has unexpectedly picked up ten dollars.

      "Read it, Moulton," he ordered, thrusting it at me. It consisted of four short poems written on both sides of the paper in a queer feminine hand. But after I had read them I was as surprised as Coltrane. There was something unearthly about them — something, as a sentimental reader later remarked, "that savored of the stardust." Down at the bottom of the page was the name "Laura E. Lent," and a post-office box in a small Western town.

      "Where, this side of the Styx, does that woman get her aloof viewpoint?" demanded Coltrane when I put down the manuscript. "She writes like some kind of angel that has put in a few thousand years ministering to humanity." Coltrane wrote verse himself once.

      "Maybe it's a nun writing under an assumed name," I suggested.

      "No," answered the editor, tapping the manuscript thoughtfully with his glasses. "She's reached peace through suffering, not by digging it up in a cloister. She might be a hopeless invalid, tied down to one room, or maybe she's a rancher's wife, living thirty miles from the nearest railroad. Anyway, she's out of the world so far that she's gotten an entirely new angle on it."

      "Ever heard the name before?" I inquired.

      "Never," he answered, "and I don't think any other editor did. She violates every possible rule about submitting a manuscript. I came near putting it in the waste-basket without going any farther than the heading."

      Coltrane ran the poems in the next number of the magazine. The issue had not been on the newsstands a day before he began to receive comments on them. Then the reviews took them up, and after they had been reprinted four or five times, the new writer was on the way to become famous.

      But of all the people who had watched her success, Laura E. Lent was apparently the least interested. She ignored Coltrane's letter of appreciation, and her only answer to the check was another manuscript, more beautiful and more poorly written than the first one.

      "She's a mystery, that woman," remarked Coltrane, a couple of months later. "I've never yet succeeded in getting a personal word out of her. This month I purposely withheld the check, just to see what she'd do about it. That usually brings them to earth. A person may write like an angel, but if he doesn't get his pay on time, the letter he sends to the editor sounds like the correspondence of a ward-boss who was cheated out of his graft. But not Laura E. Lent. She merely sent in a finger-marked manuscript that was enough to make Keats shut up shop. That woman has reached a stage of evolution where money means nothing to her."

      Coltrane sat down at his desk and absent-mindedly sorted his papers. "I will send for her to come East," he remarked. "The magazine can afford to put up the fare if it can get a woman like that on its staff. At least we'll find out whether Laura is a self-appointed hermit or the long-suffering wife of an invalid husband."

      When I dropped in at the office a few days later, I found Coltrane musing over a letter. "I heard from Laura E. Lent," he remarked, with a peculiar twinkle in his eye. Without further comment he handed me a letter written in indelible pencil on cheap tablet paper. It was undated and without a heading.

      "I received your invitation to come East," it read, "and no one knows how much I would like to accept it. To see the open fields again, to meet clever men and women, to be part of the whirl of city life, would mean more to me than anything else on earth. Since receiving your letter I have lived through the trip a hundred times. But I cannot come now — or ever. I am doing life in the State penitentiary."

      "That accounts for the sad remoteness we've been trying to analyze," Coltrane remarked. "When I go West next week I'm going to call on the Governor of her State and see what can be done for her. The judge who sent that woman to prison committed a crime against American literature."

      Coltrane left to spend his bi-annual vacation with Jack Avery, his star contributor. A week or two later I received one of his abrupt letters. "I've seen her," he wrote. "She's tall and white, with eyes that don't belong to this planet. She reminds me of a woman who has died and left only her ghost. I talked to her in the presence of an iron-faced matron who interrupted the conversation and said 'You was' and 'He ain't.' She's been sent up for murder, it seems — killed a man who had won her under promise of marriage and failed to make good, as that type usually fail. Think of a woman writing poetry in an atmosphere reeking of chloride de lime!"

      "The Governor is a nice chap," he wrote a short time afterward. "It's fear of his political skin which prevents him from granting a pardon. The judge who sentenced her rides in the political band wagon, and controls enough ballots to paper the capitol. So many of his opponents criticised his judgment in this case that he would consider a pardon a personal affront. The most the Governor can do is to use his influence with the parole board. Her petition will be read at the next meeting."

      Coltrane stayed in the West until the prison doors closed behind Laura E. Lent. The poet was silent for a few months, probably while she was becoming adjusted to the world she had been forced to renounce. Then she began to write. The first manuscript caused Coltrane to lose his appetite for lunch. The second ruined his disposition for the rest of the week. The third made him decide on a hurried trip to the West.

      "Read it!" he roared, handing me the neat type-written copy. "Did you ever see such drivel? It's the kind of stuff you'd expect from a fat, middle-aged woman who belongs to the Monday Morning Literary Club!" It was. Laura E. Lent, of the beautiful conceits and strange intuitions, was gone. The poem included a rhapsody over an impassioned kiss, a lot of second-rate moralizing over love and several references to summer moonlight. It was cheap, banal and as uninspired as a turnip.

      Coltrane's first letter after his departure confirmed my worst suspicions. "She's getting fat and red-faced," he wrote. "She has all the poses of a third carbon authoress. I believe she sells her autograph. She's almost as spiritual as a Swedish cook. Why in Heaven's name does a woman lose her soul as soon as she ceases to suffer?"

      As I didn't hear from Coltrane again I came to the conclusion that his disappointment was too deep for mere pen and paper. But when he returned, I was surprised to find him as happy as when he had received Laura E. Lent's first manuscript.

      "Any news about Laura E. Lent?" I inquired, when I met him at the station.

      "Oh, she's in good hands," he remarked pleasantly. "She was seized by some requisition officers for crossing the State line. I had the Averys invite her to visit them for a few weeks. They lived over the boundary."

      "But didn't she understand that a person on parole can't leave the State?" I demanded.

      "Maybe she didn't understand that she was leaving the State," answered Coltrane. "Boundaries aren't material black lines, you know."

      "But it means that she'll go back to prison for life," I exclaimed, aghast at his stupidity. "There'll be no possible chance of getting pardon or another parole now. And you let her break her parole without warning her. Good Heavens, man! What have you done?"

      "Done?" queried Coltrane, lighting a cigar. "Merely given America the best poet she'll have between Edgar Allen Poe and Kingdom Come!"