Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

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His gay laugh, when I asked what sort, indicated that he was not really in a jam, that he was simply playfully using the vernacular.

"I mean," said Allen, "a purely literary jam."

"Oh," I said, "you couldn't be, Allen."

"It's about that novel, Jim," he said. "It's just that I've come to a point in it where I need someone who can listen. How does it happen that you've been holding out on me?"

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

Allen's answer was playful and very, very friendly, just the gentle chiding of a dear old friend who knows that his own dear old friend is sometimes up to games.

"You never told me," Allen said, "that you had any important New England connection until the other evening. Can you come down tonight?" There was an annoying, breezy implication in his question. He was saying that he knew that I would be flattered to come. He had that egotistical conviction common to some people in the throes of composition, that what he was doing was a matter of such vital importance that anybody would drop anything to be present at the birth of his ideas.