man, with reddish hair and beard and the quick and
sensitive skin of the type. A red flush of anger crept up under the
closely cropped beard, and his eyes were bright.

"That is not true, and you know it, Bainbridge," he contradicted,
speaking slowly lest his temper should break bounds. "Is it my fault, or
only my misfortune, that I can do nothing but write books for which I
can't find a publisher? Or that the work of a hack-writer is quite as
impossible for me as mine is for him?"

Bainbridge scoffed openly; but he was good-natured enough to make amends
when he saw that Griswold was moved.

"I take it all back," he said. "I suppose the book-chicken has come home
again to roost, and a returned manuscript accounts for anything. But
seriously, Kenneth, you ought to get down to bed-rock facts. Nobody but
a crazy phenomenon can find a publisher for his first book, nowadays,
unless he has had some sort of an introduction in the magazines or the
newspapers. You haven't had that; so far as I know, you haven't tried
for it."

"Oh, yes, I have--tried and failed. It isn't in me to do the salable
thing, and there isn't a magazine editor in the country who doesn't know
it by this time. They've been decent about it. Horton was kind enough.
He covered two pages of a letter telling me why the stuff I sent from
here might fit one of the reviews and why it wouldn't fit his magazine.
But that is beside the mark. I tell you, Bainbridge, the conditions are
all wrong when a man with a vital message to his kind can't get to
deliver it to the people who want to hear it."

Bainbridge ordered the small coffees and found his cigar case.

"That is about what I suspected," he commented impatiently. "You
couldn't keep your peculiar views muzzled even when you were writing a
bit of a pot-boiler on sugar-planting. Which brings us back to the old
contention: you drop your fool socialistic fad and write a book that a
reputable publisher can bring out without committing commercial suicide,
and you'll stand some show. Light up and fumigate that idea awhile."

Griswold took the proffered cigar half-absently, as he had taken the
last piece of bread.

"It doesn't need fumigating; if I could consider it seriously it ought
rather to be burnt with fire. You march in the ranks of the well-fed,
Bainbridge, and it is your _metier_ to be conservative. I don't, and
it's mine to be radical."

"What would you have?" demanded the man on the conservative side