starving
their families while they sought such chimeras as perpetual motion.
Doubtless their wives loved them, and suffered with them and for them,
not because of but in spite of their infatuation for perpetual motion."

"True," was the reply. "But there have been inventors who were not
eccentric and who starved while they sought to invent practical things;
and sometimes, it is recorded, they succeeded. Certainly I do not seek
any impossibilities--"

"You have called it 'achieving the impossible,'" she interpolated.

"I spoke figuratively. I seek to do what men have done before me--to
write and to live by my writing."

Her silence spurred him on.

"To you, then, my goal is as much a chimera as perpetual motion?" he
demanded.

He read her answer in the pressure of her hand on his--the pitying mother-
hand for the hurt child. And to her, just then, he was the hurt child,
the infatuated man striving to achieve the impossible.

Toward the close of their talk she warned him again of the antagonism of
her father and mother.

"But you love me?" he asked.

"I do! I do!" she cried.

"And I love you, not them, and nothing they do can hurt me." Triumph
sounded in his voice. "For I have faith in your love, not fear of their
enmity. All things may go astray in this world, but not love. Love
cannot go wrong unless it be a weakling that faints and stumbles by the
way."

CHAPTER XXXI

Martin had encountered his sister Gertrude by chance on Broadway--as it
proved, a most propitious yet disconcerting chance. Waiting on the
corner for a car, she had seen him first, and noted the eager, hungry
lines of his face and the desperate, worried look of his eyes. In truth,
he was desperate and worried. He had just come from a fruitless
interview with the pawnbroker, from whom he had tried to wring an
additional loan on his wheel. The muddy fall weather having come on,
Martin had pledged his wheel some time since and retained his black suit.

"There's the black suit," the pawnbroker, who knew his every asset, had
answered. "You needn't tell me you've gone and pledged it with that Jew,
Lipka. Because if you have--"

The man had looked the threat, and Martin hastened to cry:-

"No, no; I've got it. But I want to wear it on a matter of business."

"All right," the mollified usurer had replied. "And I want it on a
matter of business before I can let you have any more money. You don't
think I'm in it for m