st as I was going to
bed, the thought struck me to try my hand at a triolet--a humorous one;
and inside an hour I had written four. They ought to be worth a dollar
apiece. Four dollars right there for a few afterthoughts on the way to
bed."

"Of course it's all valueless, just so much dull and sordid plodding; but
it is no more dull and sordid than keeping books at sixty dollars a
month, adding up endless columns of meaningless figures until one dies.
And furthermore, the hack-work keeps me in touch with things literary and
gives me time to try bigger things."

"But what good are these bigger-things, these masterpieces?" Ruth
demanded. "You can't sell them."

"Oh, yes, I can," he began; but she interrupted.

"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.

"He came in
When I was out,
To borrow some tin
Was why he came in,
And he went without;
So I was in
And he was out."

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 type-writer, 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