o be the most merciful," he
laughed softly with the quality of kindly humour which never failed him,
"we'll starve her out as soon as possible," he declared.

As if to dismiss the subject, he refolded the letter, slipped it in its
envelope, and placed it in one of his crammed pigeon-holes. "Thank God,
your own case isn't of the hopeless kind!" he exclaimed fervently.

"Somehow success looks like selfishness," returned Trent, showing by his
tone the momentary depression which settled so easily upon his variable
moods.

At the speech Adams turned upon him the full sympathy of his smile,
while he enclosed in a warm grasp the hand which the young man held out.

"It's what we're made for," he responded cheerily, "success in one way
or another."

His words, and even more his look, remained with Trent long afterwards,
blowing, like a fresh strong wind, through the hours of despondency
which followed for him upon any temporary exaltation. The young man had
a trick of remembering faces, not as wearing their accustomed daily
look, but as he had seen them animated and transfigured by any vivid
moment of experience, and he found later that when he thought of Adams
it was to recall the instant's kindly lighting of the eyes, the flicker
of courageous humour about the mouth and the dauntless ring in the
usually quiet voice. He realised now, as he walked through the humming
streets, that success or failure is not an abstract quantity but a
relative value--that a man may be a shining success in the world's eyes
and a comparative failure in his own. To Trent, Adams had for years
represented the cultured and scholarly critic--the writer who, in his
limited individual field, had incontestably "arrived." Now, for the
first time, he saw that the editor looked upon himself as a man of small
achievements, and that, inasmuch as his idea had been vastly more than
his execution, he felt himself to belong to the unfulfilled ones of the
earth.

When, a little later, he reached Mrs. Bridewell's house in Sixty-ninth
Street the servant invited him, after a moment's wait below, into her
sitting-room upstairs, and, following the man's lead, he was finally
ushered into a charming apartment upon the second floor. A light cloud
of cigarette smoke trailed toward him as he entered, and when he paused,
confused by broken little peals of laughter, he made out a group of
ladies gathered about a tiny Oriental table upon which stood a tray of
Turkish coffe