"The Poet."
A story featuring a barber who writes doggerel but dreams of literary fame, his long-suffering wife who escapes into romantic novels, and the narrator who innocently comes in for a haircut but leaves "hacked and chopped...in the vilest way" and having endured an endless recitation of verse. "The barber's wife put down her novelette and gazed at my hair, then at the sheaf of verses in my hand, and lastly straight in my face. She did not speak. But as I passed out of the shop she raised her eyebrows slightly and gave me a smile, a dark, wonderful, inscrutable smile, which I shall never forget." The narrator recalls boyhood barbershop experiences that closely match Bates's recollections in his autobiography (The Vanished World 36-38). In The Clarion (May 1932, p. 104, 114).