g Sappho!" I exclaimed to myself. "Is
this the divine fire that is supposed to ignite genius and make it
practical and wage-earning?"

The story was sentimental drivel, full of whimpering soft-heartedness
and gushing egoism. All the art that Pettit had acquired was gone. A
perusal of its buttery phrases would have made a cynic of a sighing
chambermaid.

In the morning Pettit came to my room. I read him his doom
mercilessly. He laughed idiotically.

"All right, Old Hoss," he said, cheerily, "make cigar-lighters of it.
What's the difference? I'm going to take her to lunch at Claremont
to-day."

There was about a month of it. And then Pettit came to me bearing an
invisible mitten, with the fortitude of a dish-rag. He talked of the
grave and South America and prussic acid; and I lost an afternoon
getting him straight. I took him out and saw that large and curative
doses of whiskey were administered to him. I warned you this was a
true story--'ware your white ribbons if only follow this tale. For
two weeks I fed him whiskey and Omar, and read to him regularly every
evening the column in the evening paper that reveals the secrets of
female beauty. I recommend the treatment.

After Pettit was cured he wrote more stories. He recovered his
old-time facility and did work just short of good enough. Then the
curtain rose on the third act.

A little, dark-eyed, silent girl from New Hampshire, who was studying
applied design, fell deeply in love with him. She was the intense
sort, but externally _glace_, such as New England sometimes fools us
with. Pettit liked her mildly, and took her about a good deal. She
worshipped him, and now and then bored him.

There came a climax when she tried to jump out of a window, and he
had to save her by some perfunctary, unmeant wooing. Even I was
shaken by the depths of the absorbing affection she showed. Home,
friends, traditions, creeds went up like thistle-down in the scale
against her love. It was really discomposing.

One night again Pettit sauntered in, yawning. As he had told me
before, he said he felt that he could do a great story, and as before
I hunted him to his room and saw him open his inkstand. At one
o'clock the sheets of paper slid under my door.

I read that story, and I jumped up, late as it was, with a whoop of
joy. Old Pettit had done it. Just as though it lay there, red and
bleeding, a woman's heart was written into the lines. You couldn't
see the joining, but art,