"What is it?" he said, looking at her.

"I wish you would make me a promise."

"What is that?"

"Don't read the stuff I have sent you; it is not good. If you don't like
it, send it back to me."

"I cannot do that, for I have advertised your name. You simply must put
something into the first number, but of course it will be good: you
could not write anything poor."

"Oh, you don't know. Mine is a queer brain: sometimes it won't act at
all. I was not pleased with the article. Perhaps the public would
overlook it, if you would only promise not to read it."

"My dear Miss Aylmer, I would do a great deal for you, but now you ask
for the impossible. I must read what you have written. I have no doubt I
shall be charmed with it."

Florence sat back in her seat; she could do nothing further.

The next day, when he arrived at his office, Tom Franks eagerly pounced
upon Florence's foolscap envelope. He tore it open and began to read the
silly stuff she had written. He had not gone half-way down the first
page before the whole expression of his face altered. Bewilderment,
astonishment, almost disgust, spread themselves over his features. He
turned page after page, looked back at the beginning, glanced at the
end, then set himself deliberately to digest Florence's poor attempt
from the first word to the last. He flung the paper from him with a
gesture of despair. Had she done it to trick him? Positively the
production was scarcely respectable. A third-form schoolgirl would have
done better. There were even one or two mistakes in spelling, the
grammar was slipshod, the different utterances what few schoolgirls
would have attempted to make: so banal, so threadbare, so used-up were
they. Where was that terse and vigorous style? Where were those
epigrammatic utterances? Where was the pure Saxon which had delighted
his scholarly mind in the stories which she had written?

He rang his office bell sharply. A clerk appeared.

"Bring me the last number of the _Argonaut_," he said.

It was brought immediately, and Franks opened it at Florence's last
story. He read a sentence or two, compared the style of the story with
the style of the article, and finally shut up the _Argonaut_ and went
into his chief's room.

"I have a disappointment for you, Mr. Anderson," he said.

"What is that, Franks?" asked the chief, raising his head from a pile of
papers over which he was bending.

"Why, our _rara avis_, our new star of the litera