jokes for a syndicated humorous
column. He was glad to become managing editor (though he himself was the
only editor he had to manage) of a magazine for stamp-collectors. He
wrote some advertisements for a Broadway dealer in automobile
accessories, read half a dozen books on motors, and brazenly demanded
his present position on the _Motor and Gas Gazette_.

He was as far from the rarified air of Bohemia (he really believed that
sort of thing) as he had been in Kansas, except that he knew one man who
made five thousand dollars a year by writing stories about lumberjacks,
miners, cow-punchers, and young ladies of quite astounding courage. He
was twenty-seven years old when he met Una Golden. He still read Omar
Khayyam. He had a vague plan of going into real estate. There ought, he
felt, to be money in writing real-estate advertisements.

He kept falling in love with stenographers and waitresses, with
actresses whom he never met. He was never satisfied. He didn't at all
know what he wanted, but he wanted something stronger than himself.

He was desperately lonely--a humorous figure who had dared to aspire
beyond the manure-piles of his father's farm; therefore a young man to
be ridiculed. And in his tragic loneliness he waited for the day when he
should find any love, any labor, that should want him enough to seek him
and demand that he sacrifice himself.

Sec. 4

It was Una's first city spring.

Save in the squares, where the bourgeoning trees made green-lighted
spaces for noon-time lovers, there was no change; no blossomy stir in
asphalt and cement and brick and steel. Yet everything was changed.
Between the cornices twenty stories above the pavement you could see a
slit of softer sky, and there was a peculiar radiance in just the light
itself, whether it lay along the park turf or made its way down an
air-well to rest on a stolid wall of yellow brick. The river breeze,
flowing so persuasively through streets which had been stormed by dusty
gales, bore happiness. Grind-organs made music for ragged, dancing
children, and old brick buildings smelled warm. Peanut-wagons came out
with a long, shrill whine, locusts of the spring.

In the office even the most hustling of the great ones became human.
They talked of suburban gardens and of motoring out to country clubs for
tennis. They smiled more readily, and shamelessly said, "I certainly got
the spring fever for fair to-day"; and twice did S. Herbert Ross go off
to