2.
"Who is Mr. Rangely?" Ashe inquired one morning at breakfast.
Mrs. Herman looked at her husband as if she expected him to reply,
although the question had been addressed to her.
"Fred Rangely," Grant Herman answered, "is a writer. He writes for the
magazines and is a newspaper man. He's written one or two novels, and
the first one was pretty successful. He's written plays too."
Helen smiled.
"Grant is too good-natured to tell you what you really want to know,"
she commented. "Mr. Rangely was once in some sort a friend of his, in
the old days when there was still something like an artistic
brotherhood in Boston, and he can't bear to say things that are not to
his credit. Now I should have answered your question by saying that
Fred Rangely is a warning."
"A what?" Ashe asked, while Herman sighed.
"A warning. A dozen years ago he was one of the most promising men
about. He had made a good beginning, he was clever and popular, and
both as a novelist and as a playwright we hoped for great things from
him."
"And now?"
"Now he is a failure."
Herman looked up almost reprovingly.
"I don't think he would recognize that," he observed.
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