He looked at her as she spoke, then got up as she was speaking still, and, simply and wordlessly, walked out.
And that was the end.
Or nearly.

He went to the Hotel Mayflower and telegraphed Mencken.
Would he meet him in Baltimore in Drawing Room A, Car Three on the train leaving Washington at nine o'clock next morning?
They would go to New York together, where parties would be piled on weariness and on misery.
But not for long.
Both Alfred Harcourt and Donald Brace had written him enthusiastic praise of Elmer Gantry (any changes could be made in proof, which was already coming from the printer) and they had ordered 140,000 copies -- the largest first printing of any book in history.
But none of this could soothe the exacerbated nerves.
On New Year's Eve, Alfred Harcourt drove him up the Hudson to Bill Brown's Training Camp, a well-known establishment for the speedy if temporary rehabilitation of drunkards who could no longer help themselves.
But, in departing, Lewis begged Breasted that there be no liquor in the apartment at the Grosvenor on his return, and he took with him the first thirty galleys of Elmer Gantry.

On January 4, with the boys back at school and college, Mrs. Lewis wrote Harcourt to say that she was "through, quite through".
"This whole Washington venture was my last gesture, and it has failed.
Physically as well as mentally I have reached the limit of my endurance.
My last gift to him is complete silence until the book is out and the first heated discussion dies down.
For him to divorce God and wife simultaneously would be bad publicity.
I am really ill at the present moment, and I will go to some sort of a sanitarium to normalize myself".
And she withdrew then to Cromwell Hall, in Cromwell, Connecticut.

Harcourt replied: "I do really hope you can achieve serenity in the course of time.
Of course I hope Hal can also, but those hopes are much more faint".

8
on January 8, 1927, he returned to the Grosvenor in high spirits, and looking fit.
He had been, he wrote Mencken at once, "in the country", a euphemism for an experience that had not greatly changed him.
Charles Breasted remembers that, before unpacking his bag, he telephoned his bootlegger with a generous order, and almost at once "the familiar procession of people began milling through our living room at any hour between two P.M. and three A.M.".
They were strays of every kind -- university students and journalists, Village hangers-on and barflies, taxi drivers and editors and unknown poets, as well as friends like Elinor Wylie and William Rose Benet, the Van Dorens and Nathan, Rebecca West and Hugh Walpole and Osbert Sitwell, Laurence Stallings, Lewis Browne, William Seabrook, Arthur Hopkins, the Woodwards.
When he came home from his office at the end of the afternoon, Breasted never knew what gathering he should expect to find, but there almost always was one.

He did not neglect his wife in Cromwell Hall, but telephoned her and wrote her with assurances of his continuing interest and of his wish to "stand behind" her in their separation and of his hope that there would be no bitterness between them.
She was occupying herself in an attempt to write an article about the variety of houses that they had rented abroad.
He was of unsettled mind as to whether he should go abroad when the Gantry galleys were finished.
For a time, urging Breasted to give up his public relations work and take up writing instead, he hoped to persuade him to become his assistant in research for the labor novel;
if Breasted agreed, they would get a car and tour the country, visiting every kind of industrial center.
When Breasted insisted that this was impossible for him, Lewis decided to go abroad.

He telephoned L. M. Birkhead and asked him and his wife to come to Europe as his guests, but Birkhead declined on the grounds that one of them must be in the United States when Elmer Gantry was published.
Lewis was spending his mornings, with the help of two secretaries, on the galleys of that long novel, making considerable revisions, and the combination of hard work and hard frivolity exhausted him once more, so that he was compelled to spend three days in the Harbor Sanatorium in the last week of January.
Before he made that retreat, he telephoned Earl Blackman in Kansas City and asked him to come to Europe with him.
Blackman was to be in New York by February 2, because they were sailing at 12:01 next morning.
Lewis told him what clothes he should bring along, and enjoined him not to buy anything that he did not already own, they would do that in New York.
Blackman arrived a day or two early, and Lewis took him to a department store immediately and outfitted him, luggage and all, and then he took him to a party at the Woodwards that went on until four in the morning.

On the evening that they were to sail, Lewis himself gave a party, but he was too indisposed to appear at it.
Woodward took occasion to warn Blackman about Lewis's drinking and urged him to "try to keep him sober".
After a dinner party for which she had come down to New York, Mrs. Lewis and Casanova arrived to see them off, and Elinor Wylie made tart observations that indicated that Lewis had been less discreet than he had promised to be about the real nature of their separation.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Lewis was still solicitous of his condition: let him do as he wished, let him sleep with chambermaids if he must, but, she begged Blackman, try to keep him from drinking a great deal and bring him back in good health.
As they stood at the first-class rail, waving down to his wife and Casanova below, Lewis said, "Earl, there is Gracie's future husband".
And when questioned by ship's reporters about the separation, she said, "I adore him, and he adores me".

Blackman had brought news from Kansas City.
Before his departure, a group of his friends, the Reverend Stidger among them, had given him a luncheon, and Stidger had seen advance sheets of Elmer Gantry.
He was outraged by the book and announced that he had discovered fifty technical errors in its account of church practices.
L. M. Birkhead challenged him to name one and he was silent.
But his rancor did not cease, and presently, on March 13, when he preached a sermon on the text, "And Ben-hadad Was Drunk", he told his congregation how disappointed he was in Mr. Lewis, how he regretted having had him in his house, and how he should have been warned by the fact that the novelist was drunk all the time that he was working on the book.
But that sermon, like those of hundreds of other ministers, was yet to be delivered.

In London Lewis took the usual suite in Bury Street.
To the newspapers he talked about his unquiet life, about his wish to be a newspaperman once more, about the prevalence of American slang in British speech, about the loquacity of the English and the impossibility of finding quiet in a railway carriage, about his plans to wander for two years "unless stopped and made to write another book".
The Manchester Guardian wondered how anyone in a railway carriage would have an opportunity to talk to Mr. Lewis, since it was well known that Mr. Lewis always did all of the talking.
His English friends, it said, had gone into training to keep up with him vocally and with his "allegro movements around the luncheon table".
The New York Times editorialist wondered just who would stop Mr. Lewis and make him write a book.

Lewis's remarks about his marriage were suggestive enough to induce American reporters to invade the offices of Harcourt, Brace & Company for information, to pursue Mrs. Lewis to Cromwell Hall, and, after she had returned to New York, to ferret her out at the Stanhope on upper Fifth Avenue where she had taken an apartment.
There, to the Evening Post, she emphatically denied the divorce rumors and explained that she had stayed behind because of the schooling of their son, which henceforth would be strictly American.
These rumors of permanent separation started up a whole crop of stories about her.
One had it that a friend, protesting her snobbery, said, "But, Gracie, you are an American, aren't you"?
And she replied, "I was born in America, but I was conceived in Vienna".
Lewis himself furthered these tales.
He is said to have reported that once, when she went to a hospital to call on a friend after a serious operation, and the friend protested that it had been "nothing", she replied, "Well, it was your healthy American peasant blood that pulled you through".
With these and similar tales he was entertaining his English friends, all of whom he was seeing when he was not showing Blackman the sights of London and its environs.

At once upon his arrival, he telephoned Lady Sybil Colefax who invited them to tea, and then Lewis decided to give a party as a quick way of rounding up his friends.
He invited Lady Sybil, Lord Thomson, Bechhofer Roberts, and a half dozen others.
It was a dinner party, Lewis had been drinking during the afternoon, and long before the party really got under way, he was quite drunk, with the result that the party broke up even before dinner was over.
Lewis, at the head of the table, would leap up and move around behind the chairs of his guests making remarks that, when not highly offensive, were at least highly inappropriate, and then presently he collapsed and was put to bed.

When Blackman emerged from the bedroom, everyone was gone except the tolerant Lord Thomson, who stayed and chatted with him for half an hour, and then Blackman lay awake most of that night, despairing of what he must expect on the Continent.
Finally, at dawn, he fell asleep, and when he awoke and came into the living room, he found Lewis in his pajamas before the fire, smoking a cigarette.
Blackman said that he wanted to apologize for not having prevented Lewis from making that horrible spectacle of himself, that he should have seized him by the neck at once and forcibly hauled him into his bedroom.
Lewis warned him never to lay a hand on him, and then Blackman asked for his fare back to the United States.
Lewis looked at him and began to cry, and then, saying that he was going to make a promise, he asked Blackman to call the porter and to tell him to take out all the liquor that he did not want.
"And from now on, for the rest of this trip, I will only drink what you agree that I should drink".
Blackman called the porter and had him remove everything but one bottle of brandy, and after that they would have a cocktail or two before dinner, or, on one of their walking trips, beer, or, in France and Italy, wine in moderation.

Lewis gave him a guidebook tour of London and, motoring and walking, took him to Stratford, but the London stay was for only ten days, and on the twentieth they took the train for Southampton, where they spent the night for an early morning Channel crossing.
Near Southampton, in a considerable establishment, lived Homer Vachell, a well-known pulp writer, and his brother, Horace -- both friends of Lewis's.
He suggested that they call on these brothers, who received them pleasantly.
Then they returned to their hotel and got ready for bed.
It was late, and Blackman was ready to go to sleep, but Lewis was not.
He said, "We had a good time tonight, didn't we, Earl"?
Earl agreed, and Lewis said that it would have been very different if his wife had been with him.
Then he kept Blackman awake for more than an hour while he did an imaginary dialogue between his wife and himself in which, discussing the evening, he was continually berated.
He began the dialogue by having his wife announce that one does not invade people's homes without warning them that one is coming, and went on from that with the entire catalogue of his social gaucheries.