ands
clean; otherwise, I was at Fox's disposal.

"I understand," I said, the speech marking my decision, "I shall have
dealings with a good many of the proprietors--I am the scratcher, in
fact, and you don't want me to make a fool of myself."

"Well," he answered, gauging me with his blue, gimlet eyes, "it's just
as well to know."

"It's just as well to know," I echoed. It _was_ just as well to know.

CHAPTER FIVE

I had gone out into the blackness of the night with a firmer step, with
a new assurance. I had had my interview, the thing was definitely
settled; the first thing in my life that had ever been definitely
settled; and I felt I must tell Lea before I slept. Lea had helped me a
good deal in the old days--he had helped everybody, for that matter. You
would probably find traces of Lea's influence in the beginnings of every
writer of about my decade; of everybody who ever did anything decent,
and of some who never got beyond the stage of burgeoning decently. He
had given me the material help that a publisher's reader could give,
until his professional reputation was endangered, and he had given me
the more valuable help that so few can give. I had grown ashamed of this
one-sided friendship. It was, indeed, partly because of that that I had
taken to the wilds--to a hut near a wood, and all the rest of what now
seemed youthful foolishness. I had desired to live alone, not to be
helped any more, until I could make _some_ return. As a natural result I
had lost nearly all my friends and found myself standing there as naked
as on the day I was born.

All around me stretched an immense town--an immense blackness.
People--thousands of people hurried past me, had errands, had aims, had
others to talk to, to trifle with. But I had nobody. This immense city,
this immense blackness, had no interiors for me. There were house
fronts, staring windows, closed doors, but nothing within; no rooms, no
hollow places. The houses meant nothing to me, nothing more than the
solid earth. Lea remained the only one the thought of whom was not like
the reconsideration of an ancient, a musty pair of gloves.

He lived just anywhere. Being a publisher's reader, he had to report
upon the probable commercial value of the manuscripts that unknown
authors sent to his employer, and I suppose he had a settled plan of
life, of the sort that brought him within the radius of a given spot at
apparently irregular, but probably ordered, inte