and as quickly shot down again.
I climbed to editorial rooms less exaltedly placed, up dark,
bewildering stairways which seemed devised to make approach by them a
peril. I soon knew the faces of all the city editors in town, and all
the head office-boys were as familiar with mine. At the end of the
first round I began to look more kindly on Mr. Hanks and to realize the
wisdom of his advice that I lock away my letters. I recalled the
varied receptions they had met, and when I started on my second round
they were hidden in my trunk. Repeated rebuffs had a salutary effect.
My egotism was reduced to a vanishing-point, my pride was quickened,
and with my pride my determination to accomplish my purpose. Even had
I lacked pride, I must have been nerved to my dogged persistence by the
memory of Gladys Todd with Doctor Todd and the three Miss Minnicks
speeding me to my triumphs. Every evening when I came home, tired and
discouraged, to Miss Minion's, I found a letter addressed to me in a
tall, angular hand--a very fat letter which seemed to promise a wealth
of news and encouragement. But Gladys Todd could say less on more
paper than I had believed possible. Encouragement she gave me, but
never news. News would have spoiled the graceful flow of her
sentences. Yet she was wonderfully good in the way she received my
accounts of my disappointments. She was prouder than ever of "her
knight"; her faith in him was firmer than ever; as she sat in the
evening, in the soft light of the lamp, she was thinking of me with
lance couched charging again and again against the embattled world.

At first in my replies I found a certain satisfaction in recounting my
defeats; for in fighting on I seemed to be proving my superior worth
and strength, and I became almost boastful of my repeated failures.
But the glamour of defeat wears off as the cause for which one fights
becomes more hopeless, and after a month I seemed farther than ever
from attaining my desire. I became depressed in the tone of my
letters, but as my spirits sank Gladys Todd's seemed to soar.

One particularly fat epistle I found on my bureau on an evening when I
was so discouraged that I was beginning to consider heeding my father's
appeal that I return home and study for the Middle County bar. I
opened it with dread. I wanted no comfort, but here in my hands were
twenty pages of Gladys Todd's faith in me and her pride in me. She was
sure that I should have the oppo