The Price

trains-was it yesterday? or the day before?-there was a dingy, cobwebbed café in an arcade off Camp Street which was we

bo and its stuffed crabs, and that its claret was neither very bad nor very dear. And if the walls were dingy and the odors from the grille pungent and penetrating at times, there went

ianian. Six weeks lay between that and this; forty-odd days of discouragement and failure superadded upon other similar days and weeks and months. The breakfast, he remembered, had been g

r the assignment, which promised to be a zestful pleasure trip. Chancing upon Griswold in the first flush of his elation, he had dragged the New Yorker around to Chaudière's to play second knife and fork at a small parting feast. Not that it

the strength of his windfall. But no topic can be immortal; and when the vacation under pay had been threshed out in all its anticipatory details it occu

eth, old man? You're more than commonly gr

from the joint bread-plate a

I am more than commonly hungry. But go

u might say something a little less carefully polarized. You

cally: "'Unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance

olerant enough to take t

knifed you or pistoled you or tried to poison you

any man who can earn enough money to pay fo

nbridge, with the air of one to whom the struggle f

ory. But the facts dispro

of your own theories and come down to sawing w

uick and sensitive skin of the type. A red flush of anger crep

break bounds. "Is it my fault, or only my misfortune, that I can do nothing but write books for which I c

s good-natured enough to make amends

riously, Kenneth, you ought to get down to bed-rock facts. Nobody but a crazy phenomenon can find a publisher for his first book, nowadays, unle

bout it. Horton was kind enough. He covered two pages of a letter telling me why the stuff I sent from here might fit one of the reviews and why it wouldn't fit his magazine. But

he small coffees and

of a pot-boiler on sugar-planting. Which brings us back to the old contention: you drop your fool socialistic fad and write a book that a

igar half-absently, as he had

to be burnt with fire. You march in the ranks of the well-fed, Bainbridge, a

the conservative side of the table. "The wo

d, can remodel it, and some day, when the burden has grown too heavy to be borne, we will. The aristocracy of rank, birth, feudal

ethics. I didn't know you had reache

word-begging for work of any kind that would suffice to keep body and soul together; and for more than half of that time I have lived on one meal a day. That is what we have come to; we of the submerged majority. And that isn't all. The wage-w

applauded i

n," he said indulgently. "I know things haven't b

rted now, and ridicule

: there is enough and to spare for all, and it belongs to all; to him who sows the seed and waters it, as well as to him who reaps the harvest. That is

d t

he man who employs-and rules-uses the power that money gives him to succor his fellow

glanced a

hecy. You're down on your luck now, and a bit hot-hearted in consequence; but some day you will strike it right and c

is entertainer, and he pu

more, if I am, Bainbri

stunt. But before we shake hands, let's get back to concrete things for a minute or

e was not pleas

For that length of time I presume I shall continue to conform to what we

e put the question. "Wel

ied me, and I am sufficiently hungry, I shal

out a ten-dollar bank-note. "Do that firs

smiled and s

ite possible that I shall end by becoming a robber, as you paraphrasers would p