know it. Why, I ought to charge a coupla hundred for running it at all.
But you being a newspaper man and the stuff being so snappy, I'm willing
to make an exception. Besides, you're a friend of Raleigh's, ain't you?
Well--'nuff said!"

It was upon the tip of Banneker's tongue to demand the copy back.
Then he bethought himself of Betty's disappointment. The thing _was_
well done. If he had been a thousand miles short of giving even a hint
of the real Betty--who was a good deal of a person--at least he had
embodied much of the light and frivolous charm which was her stage
stock-in-trade, and what her public wanted. He owed her that much,
anyhow.

"All right," he said shortly.

He left, and on the street-car immersed himself in some disillusioning
calculations. Suppose he did sell the rejected story to The Bon Vivant.
One hundred dollars, he had learned, was the standard price paid by that
frugal magazine; that would not recompense him for the time bestowed
upon it. He could have made more by writing "specials" for the Sunday
paper. And on top of that to find that a really brilliant piece of
interviewing had brought him in nothing more substantial than
congratulations and the sense of a good turn done for a friend!

The magazine field, he began to suspect, might prove to be arid land.

CHAPTER XIII

What next? Banneker put the query to himself with more seriousness than
he had hitherto given to estimating the future. Money, as he told Betty
Raleigh, had never concerned him much. His start at fifteen dollars a
week had been more than he expected; and though his one weekly evening
of mild sybaritism ate up all his margin, and his successful sartorial
experiments consumed his private surplus, he had no cause for worry,
since his salary had been shortly increased to twenty, and even more
shortly thereafter to twenty-five. Now it was a poor week in which he
did not exceed the hundred. All of it went, rather more fluently than
had the original fifteen. Frugal though he could be in normal
expenditures, the rental of his little but fashionably situated
apartment, his new club expenses, his polo outfit, and his occasional
associations with the after-theater clique, which centered at The Avon,
caused the debit column to mount with astonishing facility. Furthermore,
through his Western associations he had an opportunity to pick up two
half-broken polo ponies at bargain prices. He had practically decided to
buy them.