she sighed, "and some day I hope you will write novels. But now
you've made such a success with this play that you must do some others,
and when you've got two or three going steadily you can afford to take
up a novel. It would be wicked to turn your back on the opportunity
you've won."

He silently assented and said, "I shall be all the the better novelist
for waiting a year or two."

VIII.

There was no letter from Godolphin in the morning, but in the course of
the forenoon there came a newspaper addressed in his handwriting, and
later several others. They were Midland papers, and they had each,
heavily outlined in ink, a notice of the appearance of Mr. Launcelot
Godolphin in a new play written expressly for him by a young Boston
_litterateur_. Mr. Godolphin believed the author to be destined to make
his mark high in the dramatic world, he said in the course of a long
interview in the paper which came first, an evening edition preceeding
the production of the piece, and plainly meant to give the public the
right perspective. He had entered into a generous expression of his own
feelings concerning it, and had given Maxwell full credit for the lofty
conception of an American drama, modern in spirit, and broad in purpose.
He modestly reserved to himself such praise as might be due for the
hints his life-long knowledge of the stage had enabled him to offer the
dramatist. He told how they had spent the summer near each other on the
north shore of Massachusetts, and had met almost daily; and the reporter
got a picturesque bit out of their first meeting at the actor's hotel,
in Boston, the winter before, when the dramatist came to lay the scheme
of the play before Godolphin, and Godolphin made up his mind before he
had heard him half through, that he should want the piece. He had
permitted himself a personal sketch of Maxwell, which lost none of its
original advantages in the diction of the reporter, and which
represented him as young, slight in figure, with a refined and delicate
face, bearing the stamp of intellectual force; a journalist from the
time he left school, and one of the best exponents of the formative
influences of the press in the training of its votaries. From time to
time it was hard for Maxwell to make out whose words the interview was
couched in, but he acquitted Godolphin of the worst, and he certainly
did not accuse him of the flowery terms giving his patriotic reasons for
not producing the p