Ernest Hemingway

“ Elliot slept in a big, hot bedroom on a big, hard bed. And they still wanted very much to have a baby. Mrs. Elliot was learning the touch system on the typewriter but she found that while it increased the speed it made more mistakes. The girl friend was now typing practically all of the manuscripts. She was very neat and efficient and seemed to enjoy it. Elliot had taken to drinking white wine and lived apart in his own room. He wrote a great deal of poetry during the night and in the morning looked very exhausted. Mrs. Elliot and the girl friend now slept together in the big mediæval bed. ”

“ She was sick, and when she was sick she was sick as Southern women are sick. ”

“ Hubert Elliot was taking postgraduate work in economics at Harvard when he was married. He was a poet with an income of nearly ten thousand dollars a year. He wrote very long poems very rapidly. He was twenty-five years old and he never had gone to bed with a woman until he married Mrs. Elliot. He wanted to keep himself pure so that he could bring to his wife the same purity of mind and body that he expected of her. ”