oubt.
What would his good friend say to him now when he asked for a chance to
earn his bread? He had flouted the critics, the dramatic departments of
all the papers. In his besotted self-confidence he had cast away all his
best friends, and with these reflections came the complete revelation of
Helen's kindness--and her glittering power. Back upon him swept a
realization of the paradise in which he had lived, in whose air his
egotism had expanded like a mushroom.

Leagued with her, enjoying her bounty and sharing in the power which her
success had brought her, he had imagined himself a great writer, a man
with a compelling message to his fellows. It seemed only necessary to
reach out his hand in order to grasp a chaplet--a crown. With her the
world seemed his debtor. Now he was a thing cast off, a broken boy
grovelling at the foot of the ladder of fame.

While he withered over his defeat the electric cars, gigantic insects of
the dawn, began to howl and the trains on the elevated railway thundered
by. The city's voice, which never ceases, but which had sunk to a sleepy
murmur, suddenly awoke, and with clattering, snarling crescendo roar
announced the coming of the tides of toilers. "I am facing the day," he
said to himself, "and the papers containing the contemptuous judgments
of my critics are being delivered in millions to my fellow-citizens.
This thing I have gained--I am rapidly becoming infamous."

His weakness, his shuddering fear made his going forth a torture. Even
the bell-boy who brought his papers seemed to exult over his misery, but
by sternly sending him about an errand the worn playwright managed to
overawe and silence him, and then, with the city's leading papers before
him, he sat down to his bitter medicine. As he had put aside the
judgments of _Lillian's Duty_, with contemptuous gesture, so now he
searched out every line, humbly admitting the truth of every criticism,
instructed even by the lash of those who hated him.

The play had closed unexpectedly well, one paper admitted, but it could
never succeed. It was not dramatic of construction. Another admitted
that it was a novel and pretty entertainment, a kind of prose poem, a
fantasy of the present, but without wide appeal. Others called it a
moonshine monologue--that a girl at once so naive and so powerful was
impossible. All united in praise of Helen, however, and, as though by
agreement, bewailed her desertion of the roles in which she won great