lain dealing for an
empty belly. They had not been insincere in the past; they were not
insincere to-day: change of circumstance had introduced a new criterion,
that was all.

But if I acquitted my two Job's comforters of insincerity, I was yet far
from admitting them infallible. Artists had been contemned before, and
had lived to turn the laugh on their contemners. How old was Corot
before he struck the vein of his own precious metal? When had a young
man been more derided (or more justly so) than the god of my admiration,
Balzac? Or, if I required a bolder inspiration, what had I to do but
turn my head to where the gold dome of the Invalides glittered against
inky squalls, and recall the tale of him sleeping there: from the day
when a young artillery-sub could be giggled at and nicknamed
Puss-in-Boots by frisky misses, on to the days of so many crowns and so
many victories, and so many hundred mouths of cannon, and so many
thousand warhoofs trampling the roadways of astonished Europe eighty
miles in front of the grand army? To go back, to give up, to proclaim
myself a failure, an ambitious failure--first a rocket, then a stick! I,
Loudon Dodd, who had refused all other livelihoods with scorn, and been
advertised in the St. Joseph _Sunday Herald_ as a patriot and an artist,
to be returned upon my native Muskegon like damaged goods, and go the
circuit of my father's acquaintance, cap in hand, and begging to sweep
offices! No, by Napoleon! I would die at my chosen trade; and the two
who had that day flouted me should live to envy my success, or to weep
tears of unavailing penitence behind my pauper coffin.

Meantime, if my courage was still undiminished, I was none the nearer to
a meal. At no great distance my cabman's eating-house stood, at the tail
of a muddy cab-rank, on the shores of a wide thoroughfare of mud,
offering (to fancy) a lace of ambiguous invitation. I might be received,
I might once more fill my belly there; on the other hand, it was perhaps
this day the bolt was destined to fall, and I might be expelled instead,
with vulgar hubbub. It was policy to make the attempt, and I knew it was
policy; but I had already, in the course of that one morning, endured
too many affronts, and I felt I could rather starve than face another. I
had courage and to spare for the future, none left for that day; courage
for the main campaign, but not a spark of it for that preliminary
skirmish of the cabman's restaurant. I con