dha smiling in the middle of the table. "Well?" she
said, regarding him with defiant inquiry, cleverly mocked.

Buddha smiled on. The candle spattered, and his shadow
danced on three or four long thick envelopes lying behind
him. Elrida's eyes followed it.

"Oh!" said she, "you refer me to those, do you? _Ce n'est
pas poli_, Buddha dear, but you are always honest, aren't
you?" She picked op the envelopes and held them fanwise
before her. "Tell me, Buddha, why have they all been sent
back? I myself read them with interest, I who wrote them,
and surely that proves something!" She pulled a page or
two out of one of them, covered with her clear, conscious,
handwriting, a handwriting with a dainty pose in it
suggestive of inscrutable things behind the word. Elfrida
looked at it affectionately, her eyes caressed the lines
as she read them. "I find here true things and clever
things," she went on; "Yes, and original, _quite_ original
things. That about Balzac has never been said before--I
assure you, Buddha, it has never been said before! Yet
the editor of the _Athenian_ returns it to me in two days
with a printed form of thanks--exactly the same printed
form of thanks with which he would return a poem by
Arabella Jones! Is the editor of the _Athenian_ a dolt,
Buddha? The _Decade_ typewrites his regrets--that's
better--but the _Bystander_ says nothing at all but
'Declined with thanks' inside the flap of the envelope."
The girl stared absently into the candle. She was not in
reality greatly discouraged by these refusals: she knew
that they were to be expected: indeed, they formed part
of the picturesqueness of the situation in which she saw
herself, alone in London, making her own fight for life
as she found it worth living, by herself, for herself,
in herself. It had gone on for six weeks; she thought
she knew all its bitterness, and she saw nowhere the
faintest gleam of coming success; yet the idea of giving
it up did not even occur to her. At this moment she was
reflecting that after all it was something that her
articles had been returned--the editors had evidently
thought them worth that much trouble--she would send them
an off again in the morning, trying; the _Athenian_
article with the _Decade_, and the rejected of the _Decade_
with the _Bystander_: they would see that she did not
cringe before one failure or many. Gathering up the loose
pages of one article to put them back, her eyes ran
mechanically again ove