Winsett was not a journalist by choice. He was a pure man of letters, ultimately born in a world that had no need of letters; but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his real calling, and taken a subeditorial job on a women’s weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.
On the subject of Heath-fires (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of a still young man who has tried and given up. His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how little it contained; but Winsett’s, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiousities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views usually remained within the limits of pensive dillettantism.
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
