too. It's your wicked pride. You're worse
than rich people, as you call us: a great deal prouder. Rich people will
let you help them."

"So would poor people, if they didn't need help. You can take a gift if
you don't need it. You can accept an invitation to dinner, if you're
surfeited to loathing, but you can't let any one give you a meal if
you're hungry. You rich people are like children, compared with us poor
folks. You don't know life; you don't know the world. I should like to
do a girl brought up like you in the ignorance and helplessness of
riches."

"You would make me hateful."

"I would make you charming."

"Well, do me, then!"

"Ah, you wouldn't like it."

"Why?"

"Because--I found it out in my newspaper work, when I had to interview
people and write them up--people don't like to have the good points they
have, recognized; they want you to celebrate the good points they
haven't got. If a man is amiable and kind and has something about him
that wins everybody's heart, he wants to be portrayed as a very
dignified and commanding character, full of inflexible purpose and
indomitable will."

"I don't see," said Louise, "why you think I'm weak, and low-minded, and
undignified."

Maxwell laughed. "Did I say something of that kind?"

"You meant it."

"If ever I have to interview you, I shall say that under a mask of
apparent incoherency and irrelevance, Miss Hilary conceals a profound
knowledge of human nature and a gift of divination which explores the
most unconscious opinions and motives of her interlocutor. How would you
like that?"

"Pretty well, because I think it's true. But I shouldn't like to be
interviewed."

"Well, you're safe from me. My interviewing days are over. I believe if
I keep on getting better at the rate I've been going the last week, I
shall be able to write a play this summer, besides doing my work for the
_Abstract_. If I could do that, and it succeeded, the riddle would be
read for me."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that I should have a handsome income, and could give up
newspaper work altogether."

"Could you? How glorious!" said Louise, with the sort of maternal
sympathy she permitted herself to feel for the sick youth. "How much
would you get for your play?"

"If it was only reasonably successful, it would be worth five or six
thousand dollars a year."

"And is that a handsome income?" she asked, with mounting earnestness.

He pulled himself up in the hammock