was merely on general principles that
he had cabled,--"Come home." Two years was enough for any American to
spend out of his own country, even for an artist. Eying his younger
brother humorously, he remarked,--"I thought you'd better get a taste of
real life, and earn a few dollars. You can go back later on for another
vacation.... I saw Clive Reinhard on the Avenue the other day. He wanted
to know how you were getting on. Think he has another of his books on
the way. You'd better see him, Jack. He's a money-maker!"

The artist meantime sat cross-legged on his chair and stroked his
mustache meditatively, saying nothing. Milly glanced at him timidly, but
she could not divine what he was thinking of all this. As he was
American-trained he was probably realizing the force of Big Brother's
wholesome doctrine. He could not live on other people's bounty and
prosecute the artist's vague chimeras. Having taken to himself a wife
and added thereto a child, he must earn their living and his own, like
other men, by offering the world something it cared to pay for.

Nevertheless, there smouldered in his eyes the hint of another
thought,--a suggestion of the artist's fierce egotism, the desire to
fulfil his purpose no matter at whose cost,--the willingness to commit
crime rather than surrender his life purpose. It was the complement of
the Russian's "will to eat," only deeper, more impersonal, and more
tragic. But nowadays men like Jack Bragdon neither steal nor murder--nor
commit lesser crimes--for the sake of Art.

Instead he inquired casually,--"Where is Reinhard staying? The same
place?" and when his brother replied,--"He's got an apartment somewhere
up town. They'll know at the club--he's been very successful,"--Bragdon
merely nodded. And the next morning after breakfast he sallied from the
hotel, leaving Milly to dispose of herself and the child as she would.
For several days she hardly saw him. He had caught the key of the New
World symphony at once, and had set forth on the warpath without losing
time to get the Job. He succeeded without much difficulty in securing
the illustration of Reinhard's new piece of popular sentimentality and
also put himself in touch with the editors of a new magazine. Then to
work, not his own work, but the world's work,--what it apparently
wanted, at least would pay well for. And the first step was to find some
sort of abiding-place where his family could live less expensively than
at the hotel