and our wedding day is no
nearer. Don't think me immodest in thus talking about our wedding, for
really I have my heart, all that I am, at stake. Why don't you try to
get work on a newspaper, if you are so bound up in your writing? Why not
become a reporter?--for a while, at least?"

"It would spoil my style," was his answer, in a low, monotonous voice.
"You have no idea how I've worked for style."

"But those storiettes," she argued. "You called them hack-work. You
wrote many of them. Didn't they spoil your style?"

"No, the cases are different. The storiettes were ground out, jaded, at
the end of a long day of application to style. But a reporter's work is
all hack from morning till night, is the one paramount thing of life. And
it is a whirlwind life, the life of the moment, with neither past nor
future, and certainly without thought of any style but reportorial style,
and that certainly is not literature. To become a reporter now, just as
my style is taking form, crystallizing, would be to commit literary
suicide. As it is, every storiette, every word of every storiette, was a
violation of myself, of my self-respect, of my respect for beauty. I
tell you it was sickening. I was guilty of sin. And I was secretly glad
when the markets failed, even if my clothes did go into pawn. But the
joy of writing the 'Love-cycle'! The creative joy in its noblest form!
That was compensation for everything."

Martin did not know that Ruth was unsympathetic concerning the creative
joy. She used the phrase--it was on her lips he had first heard it. She
had read about it, studied about it, in the university in the course of
earning her Bachelorship of Arts; but she was not original, not creative,
and all manifestations of culture on her part were but harpings of the
harpings of others.

"May not the editor have been right in his revision of your 'Sea
Lyrics'?" she questioned. "Remember, an editor must have proved
qualifications or else he would not be an editor."

"That's in line with the persistence of the established," he rejoined,
his heat against the editor-folk getting the better of him. "What is, is
not only right, but is the best possible. The existence of anything is
sufficient vindication of its fitness to exist--to exist, mark you, as
the average person unconsciously believes, not merely in present
conditions, but in all conditions. It is their ignorance, of course,
that makes them believe such rot