? It was work performed. "The Ring
of Bells" and "The Peri and the Pearl" are not changed one iota. They
were just as artistic, just as worth while, then as now. But you are not
feeding me for their sake, nor for the sake of anything else I have
written. You're feeding me because it is the style of feeding just now,
because the whole mob is crazy with the idea of feeding Martin Eden.

And often, at such times, he would abruptly see slouch in among the
company a young hoodlum in square-cut coat and under a stiff-rim Stetson
hat. It happened to him at the Gallina Society in Oakland one afternoon.
As he rose from his chair and stepped forward across the platform, he saw
stalk through the wide door at the rear of the great room the young
hoodlum with the square-cut coat and stiff-rim hat. Five hundred
fashionably gowned women turned their heads, so intent and steadfast was
Martin's gaze, to see what he was seeing. But they saw only the empty
centre aisle. He saw the young tough lurching down that aisle and
wondered if he would remove the stiff-rim which never yet had he seen him
without. Straight down the aisle he came, and up the platform. Martin
could have wept over that youthful shade of himself, when he thought of
all that lay before him. Across the platform he swaggered, right up to
Martin, and into the foreground of Martin's consciousness disappeared.
The five hundred women applauded softly with gloved hands, seeking to
encourage the bashful great man who was their guest. And Martin shook
the vision from his brain, smiled, and began to speak.

The Superintendent of Schools, good old man, stopped Martin on the street
and remembered him, recalling seances in his office when Martin was
expelled from school for fighting.

"I read your 'Ring of Bells' in one of the magazines quite a time ago,"
he said. "It was as good as Poe. Splendid, I said at the time,
splendid!"

Yes, and twice in the months that followed you passed me on the street
and did not know me, Martin almost said aloud. Each time I was hungry
and heading for the pawnbroker. Yet it was work performed. You did not
know me then. Why do you know me now?

"I was remarking to my wife only the other day," the other was saying,
"wouldn't it be a good idea to have you out to dinner some time? And she
quite agreed with me. Yes, she quite agreed with me."

"Dinner?" Martin said so sharply that it was almost a snarl.

"Why, yes, yes, dinner, yo