goes without saying,
of course, that by writing the 'Life' I can get you any amount of
'fame'--advertisement, newspaper talk, and all the things that, it struck
me, Michael always treated with especial scorn. My name alone, I say,
will do that. But for anything else I'm by no means so sure. You see," I
explained, "it doesn't follow that because I can sell hundreds of
thousands of... you know what... that I can sell anything I've a mind to
sign." I said it, confident that she had not lived all those years with
her brother without having learned the axiomatic nature of it. To my
discomfiture, she began to talk like a callow student.

"I should have thought that it followed that if you could sell
something--" she hesitated only for a moment, then courageously gave the
other stuff its proper adjective, "--something rotten, you could have
sold something good when you had the chance."

"Then if you thought that you were wrong," I replied briefly and
concisely.

"_Michael_ couldn't, of course," she said, putting Michael out of the
question with a little wave of her hand, "because Michael was--I mean,
Michael wasn't a business man. You are."

"I'm speaking as one," I replied. "I don't waste time in giving people
what they don't want. That is business. I don't undertake your brother's
'Life' as a matter of business, but as an inestimable privilege. I
repeat, it doesn't follow that the public will buy it."

"But--but--" she stammered, "the public will buy a _Pill_ if they see
your name on the testimonial!"

"A Pill--yes," I said sadly.... Genius and a Pill were, alas, different
things. "But," I added more cheerfully, "you can never tell what the
public will do. They _might_ buy it--there's no telling except by
trying--"

"Well, Schofield thinks they will," she informed me with decision.

"I dare say he does, if he's an artist. They mostly do," I replied.

"He doesn't think Michael will ever be popular," she emphasised the
adjective slightly, "but he does think he has a considerable following if
they could only be discovered."

I sighed. All artists think that. They will accept any compromise except
the one that is offered to them.... I tried to explain to Maschka that in
this world we have to stand to the chances of all or nothing.

"You've got to be one thing or the other--I don't know that it matters
very much which," I said. "There's Michael's way, and there's... mine.
That's all. However, we'll try it. All you c