“All those you named, and which you say yourself are good — you have not sold any of them. We can’t get married on masterpieces that won’t sell.”

“Then we’ll get married on triolets that will sell,” he asserted stoutly, putting his arm around her and drawing a very unresponsive sweetheart toward him.

“Listen to this,” he went on in attempted gayety. “It’s not art, but it’s a dollar.

The merry lilt with which he had invested the jingle was at variance with the dejection that came into his face as he finished. He had drawn no smile from Ruth. She was looking at him in an earnest and troubled way.

“It may be a dollar,” she said, “but it is a jester’s dollar, the fee of a clown. Don’t you see, Martin, the whole thing is lowering. I want the man I love and honor to be something finer and higher than a perpetrator of jokes and doggerel.”

“You want him to be like — say Mr. Butler?” he suggested.

“I know you don’t like Mr. Butler,” she began.

“Mr. Butler’s all right,” he interrupted. “It’s only his indigestion I find fault with. But to save me I can’t see any difference between writing jokes or comic verse and running a typewriter, taking dictation, or keeping sets of books. It is all a means to an end. Your theory is for me to begin with keeping books in order to become a successful lawyer or man of business. Mine is to begin with hack-work and develop into an able author.”

“There is a difference,” she insisted.

“What is it?”

“Why, your good work, what you yourself call good, you can’t sell. You have tried, you know that, — but the editors won’t buy it.”

“Give me time, dear,” he pleaded. “The hack-work is only makeshift, and I don’t take it seriously. Give me two years. I shall succeed in that time, and the editors will be glad to buy my good work. I know what I am saying; I have faith in myself. I know what I have in me; I know what literature is, now; I know the average rot that is poured out by a lot of little men; and I know that at the end of two years I shall be on the highroad to success. As for business, I shall never succeed at it. I am not in sympathy with it. It strikes me as dull, and stupid, and mercenary, and tricky. Anyway I am not adapted for it. I’d never get beyond a clerkship, and how could you and I be happy on the paltry earnings of a clerk? I want the best of everything in the world for you, and the only time when I won’t want it will be when there is something better. And I’m going to get it, going to get all of it. The income of a successful author makes Mr. Butler look cheap. A ‘best-seller’ will earn anywhere between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars — sometimes more and sometimes less; but, as a rule, pretty close to those figures.”

She remained silent; her disappointment was apparent.

“Well?” he asked.

“I had hoped and planned otherwise. I had thought, and I still think, that the best thing for you would be to study shorthand — you already know type-writing — and go into father’s office. You have a good mind, and I am confident you would succeed as a lawyer.”